The History Buff's Guide to World War II (27 page)

5
. REFUGEE LIFE

Some 300,000 Germans were killed by their own government; another half-million died from bombing, but more than two million died while they were refugees.
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Officially termed in the West as “displaced persons” or DPs, war refugees flooded roads and overwhelmed towns to such a degree than many military planners began to view them as weapons. Both the threat and the deliverance of violence sent families far from home, mostly with no more than the possessions they could carry. Flight was hardest on the very young and the old, many of whom could not withstand the rigors of constant exposure to the elements and greatly reduced food and rest.

Some three million residents in southern England left their homes in 1939 and 1940. Bombing raids in 1945 left twenty million Japanese without homes. An estimated seventeen million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after V-E day.

Refugees were anguished coming and going. Flooding cities and towns with their numbers, they were rarely greeted with open arms, especially in communities already suffering privation. Many who returned to their homes recalled being treated as de facto deserters by their neighbors who had stayed and braved the storm.
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With some traversing hundreds of miles, the vast majority of refugees traveled mostly or entirely on foot.

Arguably none suffered more from the trials of exodus than the Chinese. Shackled by the corrupt Nationalist government and pocked with warlord strongholds, the country proved to be the least able of the belligerent nations to handle its refugee crisis. Estimates of displaced Chinese ranged from twenty million to sixty million people, with an unknown number dying from marches far in excess of a thousand miles.

The total number of civilians temporarily or permanently driven from their homes during the war nearly equaled the entire U.S. population at the time.

6
. FORCED LABOR

Either in their own country or elsewhere, at least fifteen million civilians (in addition to several million POWs) were reduced to involuntary labor during the war. Perpetrators in the main were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Japan.

Much of Soviet industry had been taken piece by piece to the safety of central Russia. Although factories were rebuilt, supporting infrastructure was not. Food, water, and shelter were at deprivation levels in many areas. Laborers simply ate and lived in rustic munitions factories. Workdays were extended to fourteen hours and beyond, workweeks varied between six and seven days, and absence was deemed equivalent to desertion. If collective farms did not produce the state-mandated quota (set at arbitrary levels), laborers were subject to imprisonment. Soviet citizens were sometimes paid with nothing more than vouchers for state-issued clothing. Civilians taken from conquered territories such as Poland and the Baltic states were given next to nothing while suffering in Ural iron mines, arctic ports, and on Siberian roadways.
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In the Third Reich, involuntary labor was the foundation of better living standards because the hardest labor was reserved for non-Germans. Coerced into low-wage servitude or taken by force, foreign labor was at three million in May 1941, four million a year later, and six million the next. In some factories, eight out of ten workers were essentially slaves. Reaching 20 percent of the Reich’s work force, these “drafted” Belgians, French, Italians, Poles, Russians, and others were treated much like machine parts, driven until they broke, then discarded and replaced. Heinrich Himmler summarized the state’s position by saying, “Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture.”
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In the Empire of Japan servitude fell hardest on the people of Korea. By 1945 there were three hundred thousand Japanese troops on the peninsula, four times the force stationed on O
KINAWA
, imposing order on a country from which Tokyo had already taken considerable amounts of grain, livestock, and precious metals. Nearly three million inhabitants were subjected to forced labor. Many more were deported. By the end of the war, Koreans constituted a quarter of the workers in Japan. At least twenty thousand Korean women underwent years of devastating violation as “comfort women” for the Imperial forces.

One aim of German concentration camps was to provide slave laborers. These men were photographed at Buchenwald near Jena.

Of the dead at Hiroshima, approximately one-fifth were Korean laborers.

7
. HAVING FAMILY MEMBERS IN THE SERVICE

Of the major belligerents, all but the United States and China placed a majority of their male citizens aged eighteen to thirty-five into the military. The vast majority of soldiers and sailors throughout the world were draftees, taken from homes and communities to work and perhaps die elsewhere. In democratic countries, conscription was relatively civil and orderly. Nationalist China employed decidedly more aggressive methods. An American witness equated the process to widespread kidnapping, a kind of inverted epidemic that struck down the strongest young men and shuttled them into poorly equipped, barely fed, ineptly trained divisions. In the last six months of the war, Hitler’s last-ditch Volkssturm (“Storm of the People”) sent young boys and old men against Allied tanks and guns.
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Along with the emotional price, departure of a male, and sometimes the only male in the family, was a considerable financial loss. In 2005 dollars, the United States paid its enlisted about $1,000 a month. Other nations paid their enlisted half as much or less. For the women left behind, their earning potential, not to mention professional and political leverage, was extremely limited (women in France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Yugoslavia did not yet have the right to vote). Government subsidies for dependents were meager or nonexistent. The exception was Germany, which paid wives a pension equal to a full-time clerical position.
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War also broke communication lines between servicemen and their loved ones. Aside from photographs, couples often went years without seeing each other, let alone hearing from one another. Mail was heavily censored, easily lost, and a very low priority for military transport. Letters traveled least when they were needed most, during battles, sieges, and capture. If an American serviceman was wounded in action, he was allowed to receive one message of cheer from a single emergency contact of five words or less.

Lt. Gen. John Wainwright, commanding officer among the captives of Bataan, spent nearly three years in a POW camp. His wife wrote him three hundred times. He received six of the letters.

8
. INFLATION

Over the span of the war, inflation in Germany reached 700 percent. In Italy it climbed 1,000 percent. In China it hit 11,000 percent.
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Currency is fundamentally a reflection of confidence. Governments that collapsed were often preceded by an implosion of their reserve notes. States under German occupation had the added burden of having to reimburse the Third Reich for the financial costs of their occupation. This “security fee,” saddled upon the peoples of the Low Countries, France, Greece, Norway, and Yugoslavia, was invariably many times the actual expense of harboring troops. Requiring the handing over of nearly all their revenues, several of the states simply printed more money to cover the margin, which sent the face value of notes in a tailspin.

Pushing prices even higher was the natural phenomenon of supply shortages in wartime. Due to the Japanese invasion and C
HAING
K
AI
-S
HEK’S
confiscation of crops, the cost of rice in China was fourteen times higher in 1941 than in 1939. In 1940 a few pounds of cheese cost about sixty Greek drachmas, but by 1944 the price had jumped to over a billion. Allied officers often forbade their men from buying or taking local food and livestock to prevent a worsening of shortages. The urge was often too much for many soldiers, who discovered their rations of American cigarettes had become the currency of choice in civilian barter and black markets.
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Ruthless speculators on the Russian black market made fortunes trading food for people’s rubles, jewelry, and government bonds. To keep Moscow from shutting down their operations, these profiteers made small “contributions” to the national defense fund and were consequently hailed as heroes by the state.

9
. ENEMY OCCUPATION

Invaders generally knew it was in their best interest to stabilize a nation once its armed forces had been defeated. The question was how to achieve stability. In China, the Empire of Japan tried to subdue the population by using terror (Nanking and Shanghai: 1937), puppet governments (east coast: 1937–45), saturation bombing (Chungking: 1939–40), search and destroy (Communist-held northern China: 1939–40), control of infrastructure (eastern provinces: 1940–42), and overwhelming force (everywhere: 1940–44).

Parisians were shocked when German soldiers marched into the city in 1940. Faced with a foreign military presence, many had to decide between capitulation, collaboration, and annihilation.

More than thirty countries experienced partial or complete occupation, undergoing various forms and durations of suppression such as those listed above. To say the least, experiences were mixed, but the general theme was utter disruption. Legally, whatever citizens had in the way of civil liberties were quickly removed, especially concerning speech, press, and assembly. Economically, conditions on the personal scale varied from controlled markets (with ration books and government assistance) to complete chaos. National economics generally devolved into a type of feudalism, in which occupying forces enforced quotas and restricted essentially all physical and professional mobility. Socially, communities and families were torn apart, as some chose the servitude of collaboration while others invited the dangers of resistance.

Regardless of how well people governed themselves, they were still largely at the mercy of their overseers. Even the most settled environments could erupt into bloodshed. Nazi atrocities in Western Europe provided some of the smaller but better documented examples. In 1942 the Gestapo descended upon occupied Televåg, Norway, accused the townspeople of harboring secret agents, and summarily executed eighteen men and carted the rest of the village off to concentration camps. In 1944, days after the Allied landings in N
ORMANDY
, German soldiers entered Oradour-Sur-Glane, France, forced the men into five barns, all the women and children into the town church, and set all six buildings on fire.
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