As we look back, we have to remember that America’s perspective on World War II is unique. For Americans, the war was the last conflict to be unequivocally proud of–“the good war,” in the famous phrase of New York Times critic (and wartime Stars and Stripes editor) Herbert Mitgang. For every European and Asian nation, the war was a disaster without parallel in history. What the butcher’s bill shows–and what the end of the cold war makes it easier to acknowledge-is that the war against Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly fought and won by the Soviet Union. The British and American campaigns in Western Europe and Noah Africa were almost sideshows.
Take the most basic index, the body count. Most of the casualties of World War II came on the German-Soviet front. The Soviets lost 10 million soldiers and at least that many civilians; by some estimates 15 million civilians died, mostly from starvation, forced labor and German reprisals. Only the European Jews and Gypsies lost a larger percentage of their population. Germany lost 4 million soldiers, most of them on the eastern front; another 3 million German civilians died, perhaps two thirds of them in forced expulsions from Eastern Europe. By contrast, the United States lost 408,000 troops in both Europe and the Pacific, while Britain lost 244,000 men, plus 60,000 civilians. There’s another reason why the American perspective on the war is unique. The economy of every other combatant was devastated, but America’s grew by an average of 10 percent a year. By 1945 the United States had achieved a global economic supremacy unmatched in history (and now fading).
What’s amazing about World War II is how little it settled. Yes, Hitler was defeated, and on VJ Day the following August, the Japanese empire collapsed. But in the bloody dawning of the post-cold-war world, we see that the issues that underlay World War II confront us still, no easier to answer now, it turns out, than in what the poet Auden fashionably reviled as the ‘“low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. Roosevelt and Churchill dreamed of a new world order mediated by the United Nations (beneficiently controlled by the great powers sitting on the Security Council). The cold war sidetracked that dream. For a brief period in the early 1990s, during the Bush administration, it looked as if the dream would be revived. But now “new world order” has become a term of opprobrium for many; the American mood has swung sourly against the United Nations–indeed, against all notions of multilateralism.
The future and security of Central Europe are a major piece of unfinished business. The way World War II ended resolved for nearly 50 years the problems of Central Europe: the Soviet Union simply absorbed the region. Now that the states of Central Europe are free once more, the problems of their security are with us again. It is not at all clear that current u.s. policy–the so-called “Partnership for Peace” –is in reality very different from the deeply ambiguous security guarantees that Britain and France offered those same states in the 1930s.
In retrospect, the two world wars and the cold war are in some fashion a definable unit, 1914 to 1991 being what historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the short twentieth century.” You can view it best, perhaps, as Europe’s civil war, a struggle that the Europeans themselves proved incapable of resolving, so that outside great powers had to come in and settle it for them. The cold war then takes its tidy place as the continuation of the struggle to decide who would determine the destiny of Europe.
But what was the civil war about? In large part, it was about the difficulties of giving a great new industrial power, Germany, its rightful place in the old order. The Pacific war was about the same thing: how to give a great new industrial power, Japan, its place in the old order. With Germany and Japan long since resurgent, it’s fair to ask whether we have solved the problem. In one sense, we have. Now we compete peacefully, and that is perhaps the greatest single legacy of World War II. The war altered forever the calculus of international rivalry, at least on the global scale. The penalty for failing to resolve differences peacefully –the cost of war–became unthinkable.
World War II completed the transformation of war into an industrial process. Offense and defense were gruesomely balanced, except when the victims were unarmed. For much of the war, Britain’s bombing campaign killed fewer able-bodied German males than the British lost in aircrew casualties. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan killed fewer people than did conventional bombs, but they were safer for aircrews. And by dropping the A-bombs, the Americans avoided the horrendous losses they would have suffered-and inflicted–by invading Japan.
During the cold war, NATO’s solemn threat to use nuclear weapons against a Soviet invasion was a reaction to the vast battlefield losses of World War II–and the stunning success of the Soviet Army in 1945. The Soviets faced by far the greater part of the Nazi army: 157 divisions, compared with fewer than 60 on Hitler’s western flank in the closing campaigns. While the Americans and British mounted a cautious, petit-point advance from Normandy, the Soviets rumbled westward, taking casualties on a scale dwarfing World War I. Few in the West, apart from historians, remember the epic Soviet victories at places like Krivoi Rog, Uman, Vitebsk, Kovel and Bendery or the names of commanders like Konev, Chuikov and, above all, Marshal Georgi Zhukov. The Soviets swamped Eastern Europe, making the division of the continent inevitable. Only now, as the last old soldiers fade away, is Europe’s great war finally over.
