The great European empires, which had controlled so much of the world, from Africa to Asia, were on their last legs and soon to disappear in the face of their own weakness and rising nationalist movements. The United States was both a military power and an economic one the Soviet Union had only brute force and the intangible attraction of Marxist ideology to keep its own people down and manage its newly acquired empire in the heart of Europe. (And it may have been easier to build strong economies from scratch than the partially damaged ones of the victors.) Two powers, so great that the new term "superpower" had to be coined for them, dominated the world in 1945. In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see that their peoples, highly educated and skilled, possessed the capacity to rebuild their shattered societies. The once great powers of Japan and Germany looked as though they would never rise again. Politically, the impact of the war was also great. The four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine and death – so familiar during the middle ages, appeared again in the modern world. They were struggling to look after their own peoples and deal with reincorporating their military into civilian society. Britain had largely bankrupted itself fighting the war and France had been stripped bare by the Germans. Apart from the United States and allies such as Canada and Australia, who were largely unscathed by the war's destruction, the European powers such as Britain and France had precious little to spare. Many Europeans were surviving on less than 1,000 calories per day in the Netherlands they were eating tulip bulbs. Millions of acres in north China were flooded after the Japanese destroyed the dykes. Factories and workshops were in ruins, fields, forests and vineyards ripped to pieces. In Germany, it has been estimated, 70% of housing had gone and, in the Soviet Union, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages. Great cities such as Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were piles of rubble and ash. The majority of ports in Europe and many in Asia had been destroyed or badly damaged bridges had been blown up railway locomotives and rolling stock had vanished. The allies did what they could to feed and house the refugees and to reunite families that had been forcibly torn apart, but the scale of the task and the obstacles were enormous. It is impossible to know how many women in Europe were raped by the Red Army soldiers, who saw them as part of the spoils of war, but in Germany alone some 2 million women had abortions every year between 19. Thousands of unwanted babies added to the misery. Everywhere there were lost or orphaned children, 300,000 alone in Yugoslavia. The newly independent Czech state expelled nearly 3 million ethnic Germans in the years after 1945, and Poland a further 1.3 million. There were millions of them, some voluntary refugees moving westward in the face of the advancing Red Army, others deported as undesirable minorities. Now, in 1945, another new word appeared, the DP, or "displaced person". A new word, genocide, entered the language to deal with the murder of 6 million of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.ĭuring the war, millions more had fled their homes or been forcibly moved to work in Germany or Japan or, in the case of the Soviet Union, because Stalin feared that they might be traitors. The figures are hard to grasp: as many as 60 million dead, 25 million of them Soviet. And this time civilians had been the target as much as the military.
The capacity for destruction had been so much greater than in the earlier war that much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. However, 1945 was different, so different that it has been called Year Zero. At the end of the first world war it had been possible to contemplate going back to business as usual.
0 kommentar(er)
