Blitzkrieg to Hiroshima: How the Second World War reshaped the global order

Indian Express

3 days ago

In a historic move, the UK and Germany signed their first bilateral treaty since the Second World War, pledging 'mutual assistance' in case of attack. This development warrants a look back at the Second World War, in which the UK was a major Allied power while Germany was an Axis.
The first thing that strikes one about the Second World War is the small time gap that divides it from the First World War, a mere 21 years. The First World War ended on November 11, 1918, and the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.
The First World War was concluded with a very flawed peace agreement in the form of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It was the failures of this peace agreement and the resentment felt by Germany at the unjust conditions imposed upon it that gave rise to the Second World War. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945 and caused a staggering loss of between 40 to 50 million lives.
The path to the Second World War was a steady, two-decade-long buildup. A combination of political and economic factors came together to pave the way for the rise of a politician like Adolf Hitler in Germany. After the First World War, the liberal Weimar Republic replaced the Wilhelmine monarchy in Germany. Throughout the 1920s, it was shaped by leaders like Gustav Stresemann, who adapted to the new realities of the Weimar Republic after the fall of the monarchy.
Stresemann briefly served as Chancellor in 1923 and then as Foreign Minister until his death in 1929. He was opposed to the Treaty of Versailles, whose terms he found difficult to implement. Among the provisions of the treaty were the payment of war reparations to the victorious Allies and the demilitarisation of the Rhineland that lay on Germany's Western border with France.
In 1923, Germany experienced hyper-inflation as it struggled to pay the war reparations that were imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Rifts appeared between Britain and France in terms of how to impose the measures of the treaty. At the same time, the famed and lofty idealism of the US President Woodrow Wilson came into play through his famous fourteen points.
The last point created the League of Nations, which was to serve as the predecessor of the United Nations that was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in October 1945. However, other aspects of Wilson's lofty idealism such as the right to national self-determination were to come crashing down on the harsh realities of European politics in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Eventually, even the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.
There are perhaps three elements that define the build-up to the Second World War. The first was the unstable nature of the Weimar Republic, whose economic difficulties were exploited by a rising politician like Adolf Hitler. The Weimar Republic came to an end in 1933 when the Nazi party secured dominance in the German parliament, the Reichstag, and Hitler was appointed as Chancellor.
The second factor was the harsh economic realities of the 1920s and 1930s. The Great Wall Street Crash of October 1929 was one of the world's first truly economic crises, whose adverse effects and reverberations were felt all around the world, and especially in Europe.
The Wall Street crash ushered in a decade (the 1930s) seen in terms of economic depression and unemployment. In response to this crisis, British economist John Maynard Keynes produced his seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. His ideas would later play a significant role in shaping the post-Second World War international economic order, particularly through the setting up of the Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
The third major factor leading to the Second World War was the policy of appeasement adopted by Great Britain towards the escalating demands of Germany. This policy is associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, especially as it played out at the Munich conference of 1938. Chamberlain believed that the policy of appeasement was the best way to avoid war and to buy time for Britain to prepare militarily.
Signs of impending war became obvious as early as 1936, when Hitler decided to remilitarise the Rhineland in violation of one of the key provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. That same year in July, Hitler's Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy came together and backed General Francisco Franco's fascist assault against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1938, Hitler signed the Anschluss or pact with Austria that resulted in the merger of Austria with Germany, which further consolidated his position. That same year, Hitler kept making the case for the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, using their minority status to persuade France and Britain that the Sudetenland must be ceded to Germany. This was followed the next year in 1939 by Germany's invasion and occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia.
The Second World War was very different from the First World War as far as the greater use of air power was concerned. The German air force or the Luftwaffe, conducted devastating air raids on London and other major British cities in the early stages of the war. The Battle of Britain, which took place between July and October 1940, saw the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and the German Luftwaffe engage in intense aerial combat.
The Allied powers – Great Britain, France, the US, and the Soviet Union – were pitted against the Axis powers – Germany, Italy and Japan. The early stages of the war saw German advances through overwhelming aerial strikes that were then rapidly followed by military and tank maneuvers on the ground. These tactics, known as the blitzkrieg ('lightning war'), allowed the Germans to overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece in the short span between September 1939 and April 1941.
The American entry into the war, following the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, significantly turned the tide in favour of the Allied powers as the US was able to deploy massive amounts of military resources. The American entry into the war was preceded by the lend-lease agreement that allowed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to transfer large amounts of war material, supplies and munitions to the Allies.
A decisive turning point came when the German offensive against Soviet Russia on the Eastern Front was thwarted at the famous Battle of Stalingrad that took place between August 23, 1942 and February 2, 1943. The Germans suffered other major reversals in the battlefields in Northern Africa, most famously the Second Battle of El-Alamein between October 23 and November 11, 1942, when the famous German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was defeated. As a result, Italian and German advances in North Africa, especially around the strategically significant Suez Canal, were checked.
The Axis powers seemed to be doing better in East Asia. In February 1942, British-controlled Singapore fell to the Japanese Red Army, which continued its advance by taking over the Andaman Islands in March 1942.
One of the most frequently talked about military turning points of the Second World War happened on June 6, 1944, with Operation Overlord that saw the landing of 1,56,000 men on the beaches of Normandy in northern France. This military operation was under the overall command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would go on to serve as US President in the next decade.
As 1944 drew to a close and 1945 began, the war's trajectory was marked by advances of Allied powers, the US and British, from the West and the Soviet forces from the East as they closed in on Berlin, with the final fall happening in May 1945. Hitler himself committed suicide along with his mistress Eva Braun on April 30, 1945, when Soviet forces were on the verge of reaching Berlin. A few months later, the Second World War came to a conclusive end, with the dropping of atomic bombs by the US over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945.
The defeat of the Axis powers created a new world order that was defined by the hegemony of the US. In terms of the lineaments of the new world order, it gave rise to an international rules-based system. Landmark proceedings such as the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials set important legal precedents by introducing concepts like war crimes and crimes against humanity. The horrors of the Holocaust and the concentration camps run by the Nazis gave rise to the Genocide Convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, which emphasized the idea that such unspeakable crimes must 'never again' happen.
In what ways did the Second World War differ from the First World War in terms of strategy, technology, and scale?
To what extent was the German strategy of blitzkrieg responsible for early Axis victories? How did the entry of the US in WWII transform the balance of power?
How did the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shape the post-war geopolitical landscape?
In what ways did the Holocaust influence the formation of post-war human rights conventions and norms?
Evaluate how the experiences of the Second World War shaped the creation of post-war multilateral institutions, such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank.
(Amir Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
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