Lessons From World War II
Men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and women who built Sherman tanks are at the absolute youngest in their late nineties now, living in nursing homes or relying on home care.
People who survived Nazi death camps are almost entirely gone, as are those who survived the other atrocities of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Japanese Empire.
But in order to put down the resurgent ideologies that murdered millions of people across the world and caused untold misery in such a short amount of time, we must keep the horrors of this war alive.
As Rod Serling states in the Twilight Zone episode “Deaths-Head Revisited,” “The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
But it’s not just the death camps of the Third Reich whose memory we must remain haunted by. All of us must remember the bloodlust, cruelty, and blind fanaticism that millions of people in Germany, Italy, and Japan were enthralled with.
Enough for the Italians to eagerly gas innocent people in Ethiopia once their invasion bogged down (it was far longer and costlier for Italy than planned despite Italian victory) in Mussolini’s deformed dream to rebuild the Roman Empire, a dream that led to the death of hundreds of thousands across North Africa and Southeastern Europe. Enough that the Japanese military, in a demented and callous calculus, forced their nation into a war in China, which rapidly escalated across South East Asia and the Pacific and killed millions while laying the foundations for the modern People’s Republic of China, a regime that would go on to kill millions more and is the most dangerous adversary of the United States today. Enough for the most potent technologies and techniques of modern industry to be used to commit genocide in the name of racial purity.
Most of all, we must all remain haunted by the destructive ideologies that fueled the Axis.
But in the three countries that perpetuated the worst crimes of the twentieth century, it was not just the common people who were carried away by evil. These countries’ elites decided, through opportunism, genuine belief, or sometimes fear, to back the ruling Fascist Party in Italy, the goals of the Japanese military in Japan, or the Third Reich in Germany.
The end result for the world was unprecedented death and destruction.
To avoid a repeat of this nightmare, some vital lessons are necessary to restate, no matter how many times.
Violence Can Be Necessary, But It Is Never Good
As the Ukrainians have demonstrated, sometimes you have to kill to protect yourself, your family, and your community.Put another way, violence is sometimes necessary in dire situations.
But it is useless to pretend it’s a good thing.
Killing and dying a violent death is always ugly no matter what. In this context, necessary violence is cauterizing a wound.
World War II was the most vicious and destructive war of the twentieth century and produced the highest number killed in human history. Put another way, World War II was a necessary war but not a good war.
There is no such thing as a good war.
By contrast, Fascist Italy, the Japanese Empire, and the Third Reich all glorified violence and war as something that would liberate men and make them stronger. They treated dying on the battlefield not as an ugly but sometimes necessary cost but as something to venerate; civilian casualties were not something to be avoided, but something to aspire to.
The strategic malpractice of all three powers during World War II demonstrates not just the moral costs of treating violence as liberating but the practical costs as well.
Fascist Italy’s military showed over and over again it was unprepared for a large-scale industrial war. Its conquest of Ethiopia took too long and bore too many losses against a much weaker opponent militarily, and its forces performed quite poorly in the Spanish Civil War (even when the war turned against the Republicans). Even some members of Mussolini’s government were smart enough to recognize that Italy was not ready for war. Nonetheless, Mussolini decided to join Germany in its conquest of Europe.
The result was humiliating defeats for Italy in North Africa and Greece, with Germany having to bail Italy out (and being quite annoyed about it as well). Down the line, Italy would be the first member of the Axis knocked out of the war, the entire country devastated by a German occupation and the Allied efforts to force the Germans out. Mussolini would face the well-deserved fate of being executed by anti-fascist partisans and his corpse being strung up in the Milan square of Piazzale Loreto.
Italy ended the war a lapdog of the Nazis, no different than the Vichy regime or other collaborators across Europe.
Just another tool for the evilest regime of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, the Japanese military thought that it could “conquer Shanghai in three days and China in three months” and decided to start a war in China without any clearly defined strategic goals. It took three months and heavy losses for the Japanese to conquer Shanghai, and they would get bogged down trying to subdue a country with quite limited capacity that they brutalized so cruelly. To supply this war, Japan started another war with the European powers who were colonizing Southeast Asia and with the United States. Despite the rapid conquests, the Japanese bit off more than they could chew, with the offensive capabilities of the Imperial Japanese Navy being crippled in the Battle of Midway while much of the Imperial Japanese Army was stuck in a self-imposed quagmire in China. The upshot of this hubris was Japan’s cities being flattened by fire bombings and being the only country so far to have been the target of nuclear weapons. Ironically, the Japanese military led Japan to what it said it feared the most: defeat and shame.
Lastly, the Third Reich: the Axis power most prepared for total war, yet the country that faced the most devastation and shame for its role in the war.
The Third Reich could have stayed as the masters of Europe after its conquest of France and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940 and its bailing out of its Italian allies won them Yugoslavia and Greece while focusing on defeating the British Empire.
Instead, Hitler and his inner circle decided to invade the Soviet Union in their efforts to wage a struggle for racial supremacy with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” as they called it.
Strategic goals or even logical planning were pushed aside in favor of thinking that had little basis in common sense. They operated under the assumption that because they were racially superior to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they could not fail.
The Nazi leadership assumed its conquest of Eastern Europe would go the same way the genocide of the Native Americans had gone in the formation of the United States and Canada. As a reminder, the Third Reich took inspiration from America’s most racist policies regarding Black Americans and, in the case of Native Americans, genocide.
Instead, despite a number of impressive encirclements that inflicted millions of casualties on the Red Army and capturing huge amounts of Soviet territory (occupied and otherwise), the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces) found itself in a war of attrition against an opponent that placed as much value on human life as itself, an opponent that could take huge losses in manpower and material and still keep on fighting, losses the Third Reich could not keep up with.
During Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht took losses it could not sustain against the Red Army and was stopped at the Gates of Moscow. To make matters worse, the Germans ignored concerns brought up by the logistics officers that they would not have enough material to execute a war against the Soviet Union, and as a result they had severe coordination problems during their invasion, where they had to halt over and over again to let supplies catch up.
Operation Barbarossa failed with hundreds of thousands of German soldiers dead. During the Third Reich’s attempt to solve its oil shortage by conquering the Caucasus, the Wehrmacht would lose an entire army in Stalingrad, a quarter of million men. Of the approximately 91,000 Germans who were taken into Soviet captivity, only 6,000 would return home. The rest would die in captivity.
After Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk (a tank battle in which the Red Army lured the Wehrmacht into a slogging fest it could not afford around the city of Kursk), the Third Reich would be on the defensive for the rest of the war. Ever committed to its evil ideology, Hitler and his inner circle prioritized genocide over ensuring the survival of the regime.
They honestly thought if they wiped out the undesirables (mainly the Jews), they would not be able to lose.
The outcome was Hitler lashing out at the German people and deeming them unfit to live because they failed him, never once taking responsibility for the catastrophe he unleashed. He ordered the Nero Decree, where he ordered the systematic destruction of Germany, both to deny the Allies infrastructure and to punish his people.
But once Hitler and much of his inner circle did the world a favor and ended their lives, all that was left was a country in utter ruins, with millions of its people dead across Europe and, as the excellent documentaries Third Reich: The Rise and Third Reich: The Fall make clear, eternal shame.
The Axis powers attempted to conquer the world. In the end, all three countries faced only defeat, ruin, and shame.
However, not fighting to stop the type of evil that infected Italy, Japan, and Germany earlier helped lead the world to a situation where millions of people died.
Stalin thought he could deal with Hitler to divide up Eastern Europe, and he repeatedly ignored warnings from both the British and his own subordinates that Hitler was planning an invasion of the Soviet Union. Because Stalin ignored the reality of what type of regime he was dealing with and that an invasion was even coming, the Wehrmacht was able to achieve complete surprise and utterly devastate the Red Army. These early bad decisions, combined with facing the bulk of the Wehrmacht and the lack of regard for human life his regime had, meant that the Soviet Union would lose over 20 million people to the war. To put that into perspective, that is more than the population of modern-day New York State, the fourth-most-populated state in America.
Meanwhile, the British and French thought they could deal reasonably with Hitler. I suspect they deluded themselves into thinking this way because they were desperate to avoid another war, as were the French and British people.
Keep in mind that when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to give away the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for peace, he was hailed for preventing a war not only in Britain but across the world.
The United States at the time was in the middle of its worst economic crisis in our history, and the American public still remembered the losses it suffered during World War I (though they were quite minor compared with those of the other combatants). The public was quite isolationist despite the growing understanding that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had of the global situation. It took the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to get the United States fully committed to the war.
The United States should have frozen Japanese assets and crippled its war machine much earlier, at the very least after the Rape of Nanjing. Millions of lives across Asia might have been spared, and, instead, China might be a neutral party instead of a highly formidable adversary.
Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek (leader of the Kuomintang, rulers of China at the time though in the middle of a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong) thought for quite some time that “the Japanese were a disease of the skin,” meaning he did not take them seriously as a threat until one of his own commanders kidnapped him and force him to focus on the encroaching Japanese.
The United States should have taken similar measures against the Third Reich and Italy. Millions of lives across Europe might have been spared, and the Holocaust may not have killed the millions it did in an industrialized genocide.
Before the war, the world either tried to appease or ignore the threat these three powers posed.
In the end, it took a war that killed millions to stop them from killing and oppressing millions more.
Prejudice Can Be a Serious Security Threat
When the Third Reich conquered Europe, it found plenty of opportunists and fifth columnists to assist it in its crimes against humanity, as did the Japanese when they overran most of Southeast Asia, much of China, and the Pacific Ocean and the Italians when the conquered much of North Africa (before having to be bailed out by the Germans).Keep in mind I am not including people who were coerced into working for the Axis while being occupied or who were just trying to keep their heads down and survive.
Many of these collaborators were driven by simple greed or seeking advantage at the expense of their compatriots.
But the worst of them were determined to use the occupiers to target political opponents and ethnic/religious minorities. Across Western and Eastern Europe, people collaborated to get Jews and other undesirables by Nazi standards deported to death camps and enforce the will of the Third Reich.
When Yugoslavia fell apart and collapsed into civil war in the 1990s, these atrocities would fuel war crimes of similar caliber when the Serbs cited Croatian collaboration with the Nazis for their own crimes against humanity against them.
To be clear, this rationalization falls apart when you acknowledge the biggest victims of that war were Bosnian Muslims, not the descendants of the locals who committed the crimes against humanity on behalf of the Third Reich.
But the larger point is that the Nazis were able to use the existing prejudice (especially that of the far right) in the countries they conquered to help exploit the territories they conquered and to help carry out the Holocaust.
To be clear, the United Kingdom and the United States were no strangers to this as well. The Third Reich had substantial amounts of support and not just from certain sections of the general public.
Powerful figures like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh used their influence to support the cause of the Third Reich (intentionally or not is not relevant), as did many others, in the United States before the United States entered World War II. Father Coughlin was in many ways the Tucker Carlson of his day, using his influence on radio to spread the venom of authoritarianism that was unfolding throughout the world, as did the New York Times with its sympathetic portrayal of Hitler and Stalin.
Today’s era is not the first time that much of the mainstream press acted as advocates for totalitarianism and mass murder. Nor, I suspect, will it be the last.
Thanks to deeply institutionalized anti-Semitism in the United States, Jewish refugees were frequently sent back to Europe to their deaths, most shamefully shown by the incident where the ship the Saint Louis, carrying Jewish refugees, was sent back to Europe. Most of those refugees were later murdered in the Holocaust.
But Europe was far from the only continent to see these consequences.
The Japanese Empire also relied on collaborators, many with the same motives as their European counterparts. Many were opportunists, some were taking advantage of the occupation to target ethnic or religious minorities, and many others were just trying to keep their heads down and avoid a grisly fate.
Future prime minister and founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew recalled that he was almost rounded up with a group of men who were to be executed in mass on a beach after the Japanese military conquered Singapore from the British. The only reason he survived was he managed to slip away and prove himself useful to the Japanese as a translator.
He is an example of someone who was operating under coercion, as were many people under Axis occupation.
One thing that connects the conquests across Asia and Europe is that some populations had quite good reason to hate the occupiers the Axis displaced. Across the Baltic region, occupied Poland, and the Soviet Union, many genuinely believed that the Nazis would be better than the Soviet regime they suffered so heavily under just because they were not Soviets. Likewise, many of the locals in Southeast Asia and the Pacific believe that the Japanese would be better than the Europeans they threw out.
In both cases, the new occupiers proved to be even worse than the oppressors they kicked out. Once the locals realized this (almost immediately), they began to fight back and would resist for the rest of the war.
Heroes Are Not Always Saints
Many of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies helped lead to yawning racial gaps we see today, as his New Deal policies helped White Americans with homeownership, employment, and other quality-of-life metrics. His compromises with Southern Democrats he was allied with frequently (if I am being generous) threw Black Americans to the wolves. Worst of all, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were interned unjustly at the outbreak of World War II on his order. He may have been pressured, but at the end of the day, he still signed Executive Order 9066. As future President Harry Truman would say, the buck stops with him.He led a country that preached quite admirable ideals (watch some of the American World War II propaganda films) but at best frequently and miserably failed to live up to them. Jim Crow was in full swing across the American South, and even in regions outside the Southern United States, institutionalized racism and racist attitudes were out in the open, policies that we are still seeing the consequences of today.
Nevertheless, numerous New Deal policies that FDR pioneered laid a foundation to build many of today’s seminal federal programs, such as Social Security and much of the modern social safety net, along with measures to ensure a financial catastrophe like the Great Depression never happens again. FDR also recognized that sooner or later, the United States would need to get involved in World War II.
On his watch, the United States did turn into the arsenal of democracy.
American forces would play a vital role in fighting the Third Reich in North Africa, Italy, and the Western Front in Europe, inflicting heavy losses on a formidable enemy that nevertheless could not afford these losses. American supplies would prove a vital lifeline for those fighting the Axis in both Europe and Asia, and the American Air Force, along with the Royal Air Force, would cripple the Luftwaffe.
The other great powers and leaders make the United States and FDR look good by comparison.
Great Britain during World War II was an imperial power that held colonies all over the world, especially in Africa and Asia. British policies did enormous damage to the places it colonized, and even though Britain was (possibly) the least brutal of the imperial powers, that is like bragging you are the richest person at a homeless shelter. India (considered the Crown Jewel of the British Empire) was actively agitating for its own freedom from the British yoke, and policies to hurt the Japanese military by destroying massive amounts of food and confiscating it when the Japanese were advancing on India led to a famine that killed millions in what is now Bangladesh. Keep in mind the United Kingdom was just as racist as the United States at the time, if not worse, just in different ways.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, even by the standards of his time, was a racist, misogynistic, and jingoistic prick who wanted to rebuild the British Empire. Many of his imperial policies in India led to millions of Indians starving to death, and his desperation to hold on to the British Empire would only precede more pointless suffering across the globe.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Churchill saw clearly the danger that Hitler and the Third Reich posed, and he desperately tried to warn the British people against appeasing the Nazis in the name of peace and to prepare for war. When he was elected prime minister, Churchill’s defiant attitude, stubborn determination in the face of what looked like certain defeat, and ruthless pragmatism helped Britain hold out in the face of overwhelming odds before Hitler made the suicidal decision to attack the Soviet Union and the Japanese made their reckless throw of the dice to cripple the United States Pacific Fleet. Moreover, it was the Royal Air Force that handed the Wehrmacht its first real setback in the battle of Britain, and it was British intelligence that broke the Enigma codes and played a vital role in helping D-Day succeed by tricking the Wehrmacht into deploying its armies in the wrong places.
It is a shame that President Chiang Kai-shek is not better known in the Western world; he is a fascinating and tragic figure. He led what was then the Republic of China (today’s Taiwan) against a war machine that had the edge against him in every possible way. His efforts to protect China caused the Japanese military to get bogged down and kept the full might of the Japanese military from facing the Americans. Despite being horrifically underequipped and suffering monstrous casualties, the Chinese Nationalists still inflicted hundreds of thousands of Japanese casualties and fought a highly formidable war machine to a stalemate.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Chiang Kai-shek led a highly corrupt, authoritarian, and frequently incompetent government that often brutalized the Chinese people. Combined with the near-fatal blows the war with Japan inflicted on his government, his government’s unpopular policies and systemic corruption helped pave the way for the People’s Republic of China.
Joining Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese military leaders in hell would most certainly be Joseph Stalin. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union (which I consider a continuation of the Russian Empire under communist management) became a totalitarian nightmare of gulags, purges, and ethnic cleansing. Millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the Holodomor under his forced collectivization agricultural policies. Stalin turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian nightmare on par with the Third Reich, if slightly less bloodthirsty. For those of you who are tempted to say the Soviet Union was free of racism, I would advise looking at how the largely Russian ruling class treated the people of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and other ethnic minorities inside Russia. Mass deportations and ethnic cleansing were tactics Stalin (and the Soviet leadership at large) were comfortable with.
In addition, his purges of the Red Army and Soviet government, combined with facing the bulk of the Wehrmacht, led directly to the heaviest losses suffered by any country during World War II.
Nevertheless, even monsters can at times do good, even if for selfish reasons. With American logistical help, it was the Red Army that inflicted the bulk of the casualties suffered by the Wehrmacht during the war. The Wehrmacht would lose entire army groups fighting the Red Army.
Thanks to the dogged courage of the Red Army soldiers and the stunning ability of Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov to say no to Stalin, the Nazis’ war machine was mauled, beaten, and crippled. As worthy of damnation as Stalin is, his utter ruthlessness and courage, combined with his admittedly highly analytical mind, did help immensely.
None of these powers were saints or even good. The most moral of the Allies, the United States of America, when not enforcing Jim Crow laws, still had institutional racism baked into everything it did despite its lofty rhetoric. The other great powers included a brutal European empire on its last legs, a highly corrupt and fragile regime that frequently brutalized its own people, and a communist dictatorship that was in many ways just as brutal as the Third Reich.
Sometimes you need to ally with crooks, gangsters, and monsters to defeat the worst monsters around.
Accountability Is Vital
Far too many war criminals in Germany, Japan, and Italy escaped accountability for their crimes. Those Nazi scientists (dedicated Nazis who were complicit in the Holocaust via human experimentation or using death camp labor) who did not escape accountability via selling their services to the United States or Soviet Union often fled to South America to hide like rats. Other Nazis who carried out the Holocaust and the Third Reich’s other crimes slipped through the cracks or sold their services. It is the same story for the Japanese Empire, case in point being Unit 731, where the United States government made a deal to exchange immunity for the results of their experiments.These experiments, while scientifically valid, involved torturing people in ways that make the Saw movies look tame.
Despite all of these failures, some accountability came for the leaders of Germany and Japan, along with some of the worst offenders, both immediately after the war and in the decades of the twentieth century.
I personally think a lot more of them should have faced the hangman’s noose or firing squad. The scale and cruelty of their crimes were just that severe.
By contrast, there was no accountability for confederate traitors, only a desire for reconciliation and reconstruction with no teeth.
Just a little bit of accountability helped turn Germany into a democratic and stable country, albeit a quite flawed one (no different from other European countries in that regard). Japan today will never again threaten East Asia, even if I am a bit uncomfortable with the fact that Japan is a de facto one-and-a-half-party state. Italy seems to be slipping back into old habits, however, and perhaps that is related to the lack of accountability that Italian fascists faced compared with their counterparts.
No Racial or Ethnic Group Is Superior to Another
In the end, what fueled the policies and crimes of the Axis powers was the belief that their specific ethnic or racial group was better than everyone else.For the Nazis, their belief in the struggle for racial supremacy and in the Aryan master race fed all of their policies, from those encouraging women they deemed racially fit to have as many children as possible to the Holocaust and the entire European Theater of World War II itself.
Unfortunately, the Third Reich was able to power their policymaking around race by the “science” of eugenics, a popular pseudoscience that led to other crimes against people of color across the world, such as forced sterilization, racist and self-destructive immigration policies, and justifications for ethnic cleansing, especially in the United States. So what the Third Reich did was the logical conclusion of racial superiority thinking that was quite prevalent at the time.
But the Third Reich was not the only Axis member to think this way.
The Japanese Empire was fueled in the belief that it was destined to kick out Western colonizers and rule East Asia and the Pacific in a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
In practice, the Japanese Empire behaved like a typical European colonizer, often with more brutality toward the local population.
One of my instructors at Saint Paul College was an older Korean woman whose relatives lived through the Japanese colonization of Korea (which started in 1910). The trauma of that time was so great they refuse to buy any Japanese products, and even today, animosity toward Japan in both North and South Korea is quite (justifiably, in my opinion) high.
As for Italy, it believed that it was capable of rebuilding the Roman Empire despite being by far the weakest of the Axis powers. This false belief caused Italy to enter World War II despite clear evidence it was unprepared.
In all cases, the belief among the Axis powers that they were supermen and the people they ruled were only worthy of serving them (at their most kind) did great damage to their war efforts. Both Third Reich and Imperial Japanese troops behaved with shocking cruelty toward the local people in the areas they conquered, even though in many cases they had lots of goodwill to start with. That goodwill soon evaporated into well-earned hatred. They had great potential allies, and all they did was create enemies when they could absolutely not afford to.
Establishment Bar overlord Liberal Librarian likes to say that fate or Gods punish hubris the hardest.
If that is true, I can’t think of any type of hubris more worthy of damnation than believing your ethnic or racial background makes you better than everyone else.
To avoid repeating this nightmare, we must internalize all these lessons and more.