Few in Western Europe believed that Hitler was deadly serious about creating a Greater Reich across the European continent. There were also concerns that the reparations that had been demanded by France at Versailles had been too harsh, a view expressed eloquently in The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.
When London and Paris finally awoke to the threat it was too late. By Hitler controlled half of Europe after a stunning series of Blitzkrieg victories. In , just thirteen years after the proclamation of the one thousand year Reich it was all over.
Germany was divided and lay in ruins. It was the greatest and deadliest war in human history, with over 57 million lives lost. In combat, approximately eight million Russians, four million Germans, two million Chinese and one million Japanese soldiers lost their lives.
Britain and France each lost hundreds of thousands. The civilian toll was probably higher — an estimated 22 million Soviet citizens were killed, and six million Jews in the Holocaust. It would take a coalition of the UK, the US and the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler after six years of bloody warfare that again brought widespread death and destruction to Europe — and to many other parts of the world.
The war was not confined to Europe. It affected the Middle East, Africa and Asia causing untold suffering, not least when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in The war also increased demands for independence throughout much of the colonial empires still in European possession — the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in South East Asia, the Belgians in Central Africa, the British in India, etc.
This was a particularly traumatic and drawn out process for the French, in Algeria and in Vietnam where they fought prolonged and bitter wars in an attempt to maintain their colonial control.
The defining paradigm for the next half century would be the Cold War. The Russian people had suffered immeasurably during the war, and western Russia was devastated by the land warfare which was primarily on Russian territory. But, in the process of defeating the Germans, the Russians had built a large and powerful army, which occupied most of Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Spared the physical destruction of war, the US economy dominated the world economy by Vaccinations helped lower mortality rates and boosted population growth.
Pro-gress in electronics and computers fundamentally transformed the post-war world. The de-velopment of the atomic bomb by European and American scientists during the war, not only changed the nature of potential future wars, but also marked the beginning of the nuclear power industry. World War II also gave the impetus for the establishment of the United Na-tions in , with the full backing of the US and other major powers.
There was a determination to avoid the mistakes of the interwar years which had exacerbated the Great Depression. One of the main results of the Second World War was the division of Europe. Huge armies stared at each other through an Iron Curtain that ran through the heart of Europe. The US marshalled Western Europe into a system of containment aimed at limiting and ultimately diminishing Soviet power.
The division of Europe froze political change for several decades. Attempts by some Soviet satellite states to break free East Germany in , Hungary in , Czechoslovakia in were brutally suppressed by the Red Army. There was no possibility for the nations that had been bolted together in the state of Yugoslavia to establish their own identities. The pent up demand for independence would later tear the Balkans apart in the s after the death of President Tito.
By the s it became clear that Soviet communism was failing to deliver the standard of living that most people enjoyed in the West. The appointment of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in , opened the path for a fundamental realignment of the European political landscape. His policies of glasnost and perestroika offered hope to the peoples of Eastern Europe and in he declined to send in the Red Army to suppress demonstrations for greater freedom in East Germany.
The prescient founding fathers took the highly symbolic coal and steel industries as the starting point for a new community method of government. If France and Germany shared responsibility for the industries that were at the heart of the armaments industry then there really could be no further war between these two rivals. This logic continued with the birth of the European Community in The desire to develop a new system of governance and avoid war as an instrument of policy was at the very heart of the discussions leading up to the Treaty of Rome.
The EU was viewed then and continues to be viewed as a peace project. By building up a community covering most aspects of economic life, from trade to a common currency, the EU has achieved a unique model of regional integration. Until unification in Germany was content to take a back seat to the US on security matters and to France on EU matters. Germany was a Musterknabe of the EU and one of the strongest supporters of a federal Europe. This ap-proach began to change under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder and accelerated under Angela Merkel.
Germany began to play a more assertive role in defending its national interests. It swiftly became apparent that only Germany had the financial and economic muscle to rescue the debt-laden members of the eurozone. But Germany received little thanks for its bail-out assistance. Anti-German sentiment was also to be found in many other countries, from Spain to Hungary.
Even though Germany has become the undoubted leader of the EU it is still reluctant to play a dominant role in military matters. It contributes less to European security than Britain or France: in it spent 1. This reflects a continuing horror of war in general and a determination that German troops should never again be used for the purposes of aggrandizement. This had led to Berlin being at odds with its EU partners, especially France and the UK, over issues such as the intervention in Libya and the proposed intervention in Syria.
The burden of the two world wars is much more obvious in Berlin than Paris or London. But the reluctance to use force to achieve political aims is widespread in the EU.
As the warring parties sought to break the deadlock the conflict spread even further. The British opened fronts in Gallipoli, at the Dardanelles straits; in Mesopotamia - what is now modern-day Iraq - where after a series of setbacks they ultimately captured Baghdad; and in Palestine, where they fought up from Egypt to capture Jerusalem. In the South Pacific, the Australians fought to capture a series of German colonial island territories, including New Guinea which Australia then occupied for the rest of the war.
There was fighting in , as the Japanese captured the German territory of Tsing-tau. Not all of the above fronts existed for the whole of the war, but their span is truly remarkable.
An estimated two million Africans served in World War One as soldiers or labourers. Moreover, beyond each front there was a massive hinterland where normal life was disrupted. Whole agricultural economies were ruined. Civilians starved or fled.
In Africa, all of the armies used porters - locals used to carry the soldiers' food and munitions during the campaign, who were often coerced and who endured terrible conditions and high death rates. The war also gave rise to epic refugee flows in much of Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, a process aggravated even further by the outbreak of revolution there in The war saw severe treatment of minorities.
In particular, Tsarist Russia persecuted its Jewish population and the Ottoman Empire deliberately destroyed its Armenian minority through massacre and deportation. World War One was also global in terms of the range of ethnicities and nationalities mobilised to fight.
The British mobilised more than a million Indian men for the war. They made up one third of the British army on the Western Front in - but also fought in East Africa and in Mesopotamia.
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He worked with activists and studied climate change negotiations to prep for the summit underway in Scotland. Rise of power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In the mids Hitler began secretly to rearm Germany, in violation of the treaty. In March and April British sea and land forces attacked the Dardanelles. The Turks countered both threats, causing the British to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula at the end of A joint Austro-German offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow 2 May unlocked Russian Poland and the tsar's shattered armies fell back In the Allies agreed that simultaneous attacks on all fronts were the way to drain the reserves of the Central Powers On 21 February Germans attacked the Verdun salient; however this attack was stalled in June.
Austrians' independent offensive against the Italians in the Trentino also stalled. Simultaneously they continued to advance in the east, competing with their Austrian allies in the Ukraine and the Turks in the Caucasus.
Together with the Americans, they drove the Germans back in a series of individually limited but collectively interlocking offensives.
On 15th September the Anglo-French forces at Salonika attacked in Macedonia, forcing the Bulgars to seek an armistice by the end of the month.
The German high command initiated the request for an Armistice on 4 October. The people of Germany and Austria-Hungary were battered by food shortages and inflation.
At 11 a. This video presents a concise history of the events of World War II: German armies invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France and within six weeks defeated western forces.
Soviet Union was shattered. Italy's complete defeat in Africa was avoided only by Hitler's decision to send German reinforcements under Rommel, and the weak logistical position of Commonwealth forces. The US navy became closely involved in the battle of the Atlantic in efforts to break the German submarine blockade of shipping destined for Britain. In March Congress approved the Lend-Lease Bill which allowed almost unlimited material aid, including weapons, for any state fighting aggression.
Throughout and the USA tightened an economic blockade of Japan which threatened to cut off most Japanese oil supplies. American actions provoked both Japanese and German retaliation.
On 7 December Japanese naval aircraft attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, followed by the rapid conquest of western colonies in south-east Asia and the southern Pacific. In November at Alamein a predominantly Italian force was defeated by Montgomery. The USA fought a largely naval and air war between and , using its very great naval power to deploy troops in major amphibious operations, first in the Solomon Islands to halt the Japanese Pacific advance, then in TORCH, a combined American-British landing in Morocco and Algeria in November Army AK vs AK Follow Share Cite Authors.
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