The History Buff's Guide to World War II (55 page)

A person can dedicate a few dollars or a few thousand hours in helping restore and preserve the past. For direction, inspiration, and some fascinating stories, consult the following: the National Trust for Historic Preservation (
www.nthp.org
); Lou Thole,
Forgotten Fields of America: World War II Bases and Training, Then and Now
, volumes 1 and 2; Kit Bonner and Carlyn Bonner,
Warship Boneyards
(2001); and Nicholas A. Veronico et al.,
Military Aircraft Boneyards
(2000).

One World War II site that has endured but was not supposed to was the Pentagon. Hurriedly built in 1942, it was intended as a temporary facility to house the voluminous staff of the War Department. The onset of the Cold War greatly extended its lease on life.

10.
REENACT

It's not just for Civil War buffs anymore. Since the 1970s, World War II reenacting has grown from a few enthusiasts into a worldwide assortment of living history groups. Most portray specific combat units, such as the U.S. Second Armored Division (based in California) and A Company, First Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles (fine blokes mostly from Mississippi and Arkansas). There are Czechs impersonating U.S. Airborne, Belgians acting as Canadian paratroopers, French portraying themselves, and Americans duplicating British infantry. Some groups depict Soviet and German units but strive to be apolitical, focusing instead on the physical, technical, and communal aspects of soldiering.

Participants work to know as much as possible about their historic unit—what the soldiers ate, where they served, how they fought—to better appreciate and understand the military experience of the war. To share what they’ve learned, many reenacting outfits take part in public demonstrations, parades, restoration projects, and battle reenactments.

Be warned: World War II reenacting takes a great deal of time, study, and fitness. It is also a pricey pursuit. Uniforms, mock weapons, rations, camp gear, and travel can easily cost a few thousand green-backs. Some units even maintain working historic vehicles.

To learn more, go to the Military History Reenactment website (
www.reenactor.net
). Also, find a nearby event, speak with the participants, and take note of the rigors involved. It is hard work and hard play, but there is nothing quite like lugging a forty-pound pack, slogging on a long march through a cold rain, wearing wet wool, and downing Crations to bring a person a little closer to living history.

Several airborne reenactment groups like the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment out of Detroit are pretty serious. They actually use period equipment and jump out of planes.

EPILOGUE

The wars within the Second World War died just as they were born—one by one. By mid-1943, organized fighting ceased in North Africa, and U-boats quietly withdrew from the North Atlantic. In late 1944 Greece, Hungary, and Romania succumbed to the Red Army. Through the spring of 1945 Germany underwent a long, slow, bloody implosion, crushed between two grand armies totaling five million troops. The Third Reich would outlive its master by a mere week. By August 1945, the Empire of Japan was no longer an empire—beaten, starved, surrounded, and finally eradiated into capitulation.

In Europe, commonly observed endpoints to the war were May 7, 1945, when Gen. Alfred Jodl surrendered to the Western Allies in Reims, France, and the following day, when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel repeated the ceremony with the Soviets in Berlin. In the Pacific the Japanese government unconditionally surrendered on August 14, 1945. Allies recognized the next day as V-J Day, although formal victory came on the deck of the battleship USS
Missouri
on September 2, 1945.

Of more than one hundred nations and colonies involved in World War II, the highest death toll belonged to the Soviet Union. Moscow initially estimated 20 million dead, a number viewed with much skepticism in the West. More recent evidence suggests the assessment was in fact too low; a count of 28 million is more accurate. Unlike most countries, the Soviet Union did not replace its losses quickly. By 1950 the nation still had 12 million fewer citizens than in 1939. China suffered the second highest number of fatalities with perhaps 15 million dead, but its overall population increased by more than 100 million during the course of the war. Germany lost 7 million, with Poland next at 6 million. At least 2.5 million Japanese died. Yugoslavia lost 1.5 million, followed by Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and Romania each losing approximately 600,000 citizens.

Great Britain, losing 300,000 military personnel and 61,000 civilians, stood fourteenth among the worst subtracted nations. The United States ranked fifteenth globally in total losses with 407,318 military and several hundred civilian fatalities, or about 0.2 percent of its overall population. In all, the Axis lost nearly 13 million people. Allied nations lost approximately 45 million.

Of the war’s innumerable legacies, there were a great many positives. The war fostered leaps in medicine, particularly in the fields of antibiotics, synthesized pharmaceuticals, and psychology. Rudimentary data machines became the first step to the creation of computers. Soon after the war, women in France, Italy, Hungary, Japan, and Yugoslavia gained the right to vote. Ultramilitarist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan all but disappeared, slowly and steadily replaced by stable representative democracies. In international affairs, previously diehard independent states acknowledged the need for greater cooperation. The United Nations came into formal existence in October 1945, greatly expanding upon the powers and membership of its predecessor. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, formed in December 1945, were designed to prevent the possibility of another global economic depression. Signaling a return of faith in collective security, twelve countries joined in creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, countered by eight nations conglomerating into the Warsaw Pact in 1951. Though many viewed the two alliances as caustic threats to world unity, the institutions proved to be stabilizing forces in a bipolar standoff.

Of course, there were many changes of questionable merit. Before the war there were no such things as nerve gases, proximity fuses, cruise missiles, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and atomic bombs.

Arguably, no legacy was as obstinate and enduring as the war itself. In many ways the global conflict did not end in 1945. Several Nazi concentration camps remained open under Soviet management. Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and others in the eastern sector continued operation well into 1950, interning former Nazis and others deemed menacing to international security. Evidence suggests some ten thousand people died in Buchenwald alone.

The refugee crisis worsened after the war. There were seven million Japanese in China, Korea, Malay, and the Pacific, and more than eleven million Germans in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere. Perhaps five million imported slave laborers and camp inmates were still alive in Germany by the time Berlin fell, along with untold numbers of Koreans forcibly detained in Japan and Manchuria. There were displaced persons of all nationalities, soldiers in remote outposts, and POWs, all numbering in the millions. Exact numbers are unattainable, but deaths from postwar migrations likely matched or exceeded the lives consumed by the Holocaust.

A lasting misery was the war’s incredible depth of devastation. With the exception of the United States and Canada, national economies took years—in some cases decades—to return to prewar levels. Factories, bridges, dams, canals, roads, boats, and vehicles were destroyed, not to mention millions of draft animals and farms. Major centers of civilization had been reduced to ashes and rubble. Families that had once thought of owning a radio or perhaps an automobile were reduced to searching daily for food, water, and shelter. Unexploded bombs, shells, and mines continued to deform and kill for decades to come.

Although peace came to Germany and Japan, fighting continued well after 1945 in China, Greece, India, Indochina, Indonesia, and Palestine. Inspired by the weakening of empires, colonies throughout Africa and South Asia vied for independence, many of them through armed insurrection. The Red Army remained in Eastern and Central Europe for forty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich. The U.S. armed forces never left Okinawa, Japan, or Germany.

The Allies conducted war-crimes trials regularly into the 1960s. In the West, more than 5,000 Germans were brought to trial, over 800 were sentenced to death, and 486 of these sentences were carried out. Soviet courts tried 87,000 Germans, jailing or executing the majority. Israel, which did not exist at war’s end, convicted alleged Nazis into the 1990s. By and large, war criminals on the Allied side were not prosecuted or punished, including many within the Red Army who proved just as capable of unspeakable crimes against humanity as their Axis counterparts.

The most lethal consequence of the war came in the shape of the Cold War. In the 1930s, the United States and Soviet Union were generally isolationist and little more than aloof to each other. By the end of the 1940s the two states had transformed into superpowers, well-armed, mutually hostile, and positioned directly against each other in East Asia and across the heart of Europe. The following decades witnessed an open contest for hegemony, ballooning expenditures on defense programs, and the stockpiling of enough nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to destroy the world several times over.

Fittingly, the Cold War ended in peace at the same time, and with the same document, that officially ended the Second World War. On September 12, 1990, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States signed a peace agreement with West and East Germany, the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. The accord enabled the parties “to overcome the division of the continent” and to effectively bring to an end the costliest and bloodiest conglomeration of wars in human history.

The question arises whether another world war is possible. Unsettling is the fact that no one truly expected World War II to happen. Certainly no one could have predicted the level or lethality of its consequences.

In 1939, Americans hoped to stay out of several small wars, aspiring instead to concentrate on domestic issues. By 1945 the United States was the world’s largest arsenal and most advanced fighting machine, with an armed presence in more than half the time zones of the planet, supporting forty countries with weapons and machinery, and sole owner of the most powerful weapon ever devised.

Japan’s militarists created a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere stretching from the tail of the Aleutians to the edges of Australia. In three years the reckless experiment died by the sword, leaving many of the warmongers dead and previously undefeated Japan under foreign occupation.

Nazi heads professed their rule would endure for a thousand years—it lasted twelve. A demonic former corporal thought he could divide and conquer nations, taking each one after a few weeks of intense military assault. But after six years of war, he had lost everything, including his life. His plans to eradicate Zionism and Bolshevism fell short, to say the least. By the end of 1945, Israel was soon to become a political reality, and communism had spread from one country to ten, including the eastern third of Germany.

Hubris and miscalculation may again permit a collection of wars to merge into a worldwide conflict. As Hitler’s confidant Albert Speer noted in 1947, global chaos may be unthinkable, but it is not improbable. While serving a twenty-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Speer reflected upon the Second World War and observed: “The build-up of negative impulses, each reinforcing the other, can inexorably shake to pieces the complicated apparatus of the modern world.”

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