SECOND WORLD WAR
There can be no finer way to honour the men and women who lost their lives in two world wars, than the inscription on the Kohima Epitaph, written by John Maxwell Edmonds.
When you go home, tell them of us and say.
For your tomorrow. We gave our today.
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The ITV Television Company began to broadcast “The World at War” series in October 1973. The 26 episodes of the series was narrated by British actor Sir Laurence Olivier. The final episode, named “Remember” was broadcast in May 1974. The episode began with the narrator saying, “The Day the Soldiers Came”, and showed the massacre at Ourador-sur-Glaise and ended with American historian Dr. Stephen Ambrose taking up the story:
“The British had as many problems, if not more, recovering from victory as the Germans did recovering from defeat. What did Britain get out of the war? Not very much, she lost a great deal. Positively she got a moral claim on the world as the nation and her dominions and colonies who had stood against Hitler alone for a year and provided the moral leadership against the Nazis when everyone else was willing to cave in to the Nazis.
The single criticism I would make of Churchill during the war was that he overstrained the British economy for victory, that he did more than had to be done. Britain was the most mobilised nation in the war. The rail system was worn out, the industrial plant was worn out, the transport system was worn out. In addition, the Americans drove a very hard bargain. The Lend-Lease Act [1941], which Churchill called the “least sordid act in all human history”, may well have been that, but there was much about it all that wasn’t pretty. The Americans insisted that the British sell their overseas assets, this meant that at the end of the war the income that the British counted on and depended on for so long from her overseas investments was no longer there. They had been sold at American insistence. Beyond that, the Americans had also forced the British to break up the sterling bloc to open it up to American investment and the United States had all kinds of excess capital available for overseas investment when the war ended. The Americans then moved into the areas that had been British colonies, whether simple or economic colonies. So Britain was in a much weaker position at the end of the war than she had been at the beginning and was not in a position to recover. Added to that was the sentiment around the world that had been built up by Allied propaganda that this was a war for human freedom, liberty, freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom from exploitation, so that you had a universal sentiment to end European colonisation, which was in the large part British colonisation.
At the end of the war there was great hope. No one dared to use the words Woodrow Wilson had used in World War One, that this was “the war to end all wars”, but that was the sentiment. There was great hope in the world that this would happen, that this was the last war, that the victors would now be able to cooperate in peace as they had in war, to see to it that the four policemen – as Roosevelt liked to refer to Britain, France, the USSR and the United States – would be able to see to it there would be no more aggression in the world. That the war had meant something, that it had been fought for something rather than simply against Nazism, something positive, a better world was going to emerge. I suspect even Stalin thought it.
America wanted to have a very strong Japan, as a counter to the Soviets in the Far East, and also as a counter to what they feared was going to happen in China. Already the handwriting was on the wall in China as to who was going to win the civil war there. The Americans wanted Japan rebuilt as quickly as possible and a highly industrialised Japan to emerge from the war within the American orbit. So they systematically excluded all the Allies. The Australians and British had wanted reparations from Japan: they had suffered pretty badly at the hands of the Japanese and had a good claim for getting something back. The Americans absolutely refused and Japan had no reparations to pay at all. The Russians in the Far East, aside from gains of such places as Port Arthur, Manchuria and North Korea, got a Communist China. It’s not clear that Stalin wanted a Communist China: he gave very little support to Mao to win the Chinese civil war. Both parties would soon enough have reason to wonder how good a deal they made, with the growth of Japan since the war and her economic position today, and obviously the Soviet Union has had enormous difficulties with China.
Was a Russian/American conflict inevitable? It mattered little if it was a Tsarist Russia or a Communist Russia. Of course, all of these great world conflicts, of which the twentieth century had seen the worst, are always followed by a falling out between the victors once they have lost everything that holds them together – the common enemy. Russian ambitions and American ambitions were bound to clash. Added to this was the ideological dispute between capitalism and Communism that heightened but did not create the tension. I think this one of the few times in history when one can use the word “inevitable”. I don’t think there was a ghost of a chance of the Russians and Americans creating the kind of world they talked about during the war – an Atlantic Charter kind of world, or a United Nations kind of world, in which the victors continue to cooperate as they did during the war.
I think one can be very positive about the Second World War. The most important single result is that the Nazis were crushed, the militarists in Japan were crushed, the Fascists in Italy were crushed, and surely justice has never been better served”.
To Summarise, Dr. Ambrose stated:
“Until America entered the war in December 1941, Britain and the Colonies were sole defenders against Nazi Germany. Because America had never been attacked, they were producing more food than they could eat, more steel than they could use and more clothes than they could wear. Britain was beholden to the U.S. for supplies, and entered into an agreement that the U.S. would provide Britain with all the supplies they required. The U.S. emerged from the war as overall winners, both financially and militarily. Germany would be rebuilt, but British soldiers came home to austerity. Britain did not fare very well in the end”.
“Not much for the Freedom of the World”.
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The Bay Museum & Research Facility 