WW II 1939 - 45 Remembered Audio link to Churchill's speeches courtesy of BBC Archives. Exclusive:The unseen photographs that throw new light on the First World (bottom of page)
First World War officially ends on Sunday
By Gaby Leslie 03.10.2010.
The
First World War will officially end on Sunday when Germany pays off the
last of the enormous debt which was set by the Allies 92 years ago.
The
final £60 million instalment is part of a £22 billion debt imposed for
starting one of the bloodiest conflicts in history will be cleared on
what will also be the 20th anniversary of German reunification.
The
Allied victors - primarily Britain, France and America set the
reparations in 1919's Treaty of Versailles - a peace agreement - as
both compensation and punishment for waging the four year war, which
left 10 million soldiers dead, and European towns and cities devastated.
Germany's
Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues said
that the bond issued to pay remaining debts stemming from 'The War To
End All Wars' will be written off on 3 October.
Germany's
best-selling daily newspaper, Bild, said: "On Sunday the last bill is
due and the First World War finally, financially at least, terminates
for Germany."
The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919
was 226 billion Reichsmarks, but was later reduced to 132 billion, £22
billion at the time.
However, the bill would have been settled
much earlier had Adolf Hitler not refused to pay the reparations during
his dictatorship. The bill was also frozen again when West and East
Germany split, and renewed again after reunification in 1990.
Most of the war reparations go to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds.
Blitz 70th anniversary:Night of fire that heralded a new kind of war
St Paul's cathedral in London during the blitz in World War II. Credit: Popperfoto
It was late in the afternoon of an early September Saturday 70
years ago when the German bombers came, flying low, in formation, up
the Thames, their engines roaring as they headed for London to start
eight months of bombing the capital.
"It was the most amazing, impressive, riveting sight," wrote Colin
Perry, a lad cycling that afternoon on Chipstead Hill, Surrey, in a
memoir years later.
"Directly above me were literally hundreds of planes … the sky was
full of them. Bombers hemmed in with fighters, like bees around their
queen, like destroyers round the battleship, so came Jerry."
Mavis Fabling, now 80, remembers that afternoon of 7 September
1940 just as clearly. She said: "I can still remember it very vividly.
We lived in Abbey Wood, three miles from Woolwich Arsenal. My mother
was baking in the kitchen, I was playing outside and my father was
digging in the garden. Suddenly he rushed inside. He'd seen the planes
overhead. 'Quick, quick, quick, get into the air raid shelter.' We ran
down into the shelter in our garden.
"There were awfully frightening sounds, of bombs dropping and then
there was one ghastly, thunderous sound. It was a direct hit on our
neighbour's shelter. They were all killed, the whole family, except the
father who was out. My mother had taken his wife shopping the day
before to buy clothes at the Co-op. I can remember looking out of the
window at the coffins being brought out and my mother very distressed.
"Then my father got the car from his work and took us down to my
grandfather's house in Kent and I can remember looking back out of the
window and seeing the sky glowing red behind us."
The records of the London fire brigade for that day, now kept in
the metropolitan archives office in Clerkenwell, tell the story of the
first major raid of the blitz
in meticulous and sober detail. Neatly typed official green slips
record each incident and a separate bound volume lists all the fires
attended.
There had been scattered, small-scale raids for weeks, but this
was the first concerted attack, ordered two days before by Hitler in
retaliation for an RAF raid on Berlin a fortnight earlier.
The fire brigade's day started quietly enough but by late
afternoon the records show, minute by minute, incidents coming thick
and fast. First the East End, then the docks, both sides of the river,
then the City and – more sporadically – the West End.
Trivial fires – 6ft by 4ft patch of grass burned in the garden of
207 Waller Road, SE14 at 6.40pm – are listed alongside the major: 24-48
Dee Street, Poplar E14, explosive bomb; Culloden Street School; 50-68
and 41 to 71 Aberfeldy Street; and 2-36 and 1-37 Ettrick Street – a
whole neighbourhood flattened.
On Telegraph Hill, one of the highest points in south London, St
Catherine's church was hit by an incendiary bomb: "Nave severely
damaged and most part of roof off." It took 10 years before the church
was rededicated. "We've just redone the rest of the roof," said the
current vicar, Zambian-born Francis Makambwe. "So we're ready for
another war."
The communities beside the docks got it worst: Silvertown on the
north side was cut off for hours, its roads and terraces ablaze,
Deptford too. At 6.07pm Childeric Road off New Cross Road was hit: 21
to 61 and 10-40 inclusive, 37 private houses severely damaged. At
nearby Ruddigore Road, 13 private houses were damaged by explosion and
fractured gas main. At Childeric Road today, the west side of the road
still stands: a neat Victorian terrace of all the odd numbers. But the
other side of the road is now a park.
Stacey Simkins, then 16 and an office boy enrolled as a fire
brigade messenger – sometimes allowed to hold the hose when other
firemen were busy – was off duty that night, at home with his family in
East Ham. "When the bombers came over that night, most of us stood
outside in the road, watching the fires down on the docks. It sounds
ridiculous to say it now, doesn't it? We didn't think about the bombs,
it was just that old cockney thing: 'Woss goin' on?' "
The fire brigade was nearly overwhelmed. At the start of the war,
London had just 120 red fire engines and 2,000 motorised pumps. That
night's records repeatedly say "Extinguished by handpump" or
"Extinguished by strangers with sand."
Historian Francis Beckett, who has written a history of the fire
brigade's union in the war, quotes one officer from the docks: "There
were pepper fires loading the surrounding air heavily with stinging
particles … so it felt like breathing fire itself; a paint fire,
white-hot flame coating the pump with varnish. A rubber fire gave forth
black clouds of smoke … sugar burns well in liquid form as it floats on
the water.
"Tea makes a blaze that's sweet, sickly and intense. It struck one
man as a quaint reversal of the fixed order of things to be pouring
cold water on to hot tea leaves. A grain warehouse … brings forth banks
of black flies, rats in hundreds and the residue of burnt wheat, a
sticky mess that pulls your boots off."
By 6.30pm there were nine fires out of control in the docks.
Timber stacks on Surrey docks were so fiercely alight that a fireboat
had its paint scorched off in seconds. A rum warehouse went up, its
contents spilling into the water and setting the Thames ablaze "like a
Christmas pudding". There was a 1,000-metre wall of flame below Tower
Bridge.
At 8.30pm, a second wave of bombers arrived, using the fires to
guide them up the river. By 3am the next day, the exhausted firemen
were gaining control. At 5am the all-clear was sounded.
The first night's raid left 430 killed, including seven
firefighters, 60 boats sunk and the docks destroyed. Beckett quotes a
fireman: "A man who returned from leave the following day found
colleagues in shock, convinced they would not live for more than
another week. Men who were old enough to have fought in the first world
war said the western front offered nothing worse than they had seen."
The next night, the bombers came again, killing another 400. On 9
September 200 bombers came by day, 170 by night and their bombs killed
370. They came for 57 consecutive nights between mid-September and
mid-November and then regularly for another six months until May 1941.
Two years later, there would be doodlebugs and V2 rockets.
"Somehow, we just carried on," said Mavis Fabling. "I think it was
worse for our parents than for us. I got used to doing my homework in
the shelter. The teachers still expected you to learn your Shakespeare
sonnet for the morning."
Ex-fighter pilots
and relatives of war heroes joined commemorations as Sir Winston
Churchill's stirring "so much owed by so many to so few" speech was
read out, prompting tears in the crowd.
Actor Robert Hardy began reading out the speech at 3.52pm on
Friday, exactly 70 years after the wartime prime minister delivered it
in Parliament.
Among those gathered for the ceremony at the Churchill War Rooms were Dame Vera Lynn and Sir Winston's daughter, Lady Soames.
Speaking afterwards, Dame Vera, the singer of We'll Meet Again,
said: "It brought it all back. "So much was owed to so few - and it is
wonderful that some of those brave men are here."
It is sometimes difficult for younger people to really appreciate
what these men went through. And with that in mind we invited Alfred
George - a veteran army gunner from Kent - to go back to the beaches
for the first time in seven decades. And he took his granddaughter with
him.
By: Derek Johnson.
Video report: http://www.itv.com/meridian-east/alfred-returns52713/
Little Ships cross again
I
n
Dunkirk around 50 'Little Ships' berthed after setting sail from Kent
early this morning. The flotilla will remain there for the next few
days as a series of events take place.
By: Rachel Hepworth
Video report: http://www.itv.com/meridian-east/little-ships-cross-again15316/
Memories of the Holocaust: Zigi Shipper. 'We saw the chimneys. Rumours said it was a crematorium. I didn't know what that meant'
Zigi Shipper, Holocaust survivor Photograph: David Levene On the morning after war broke out in September 1939, Zigi Shipper woke up to find his father standing by his bed. "He told me the Germans were coming and he had to go away." How could he leave you, I ask? "Like a lot of people in £ódz [the Polish city where Zigi was born], he thought the Nazis would only be after men of fighting age, not children and women. Nobody thought they would want to kill all Jews. How wrong we were. But still, my father ran away to Russia, thinking that was the right thing to do."
Zigi (short for Zygmunt) was nine. "That was the last time I saw my dad," he tells me in his living room in Bushey, Hertfordshire. His father returned to Poland later in the war but could only get as far as the Warsaw ghetto. What happened to him? "I presume he died. I have been to all the museums and I can't find a trace of him. He might have died in the Warsaw ghetto or Treblinka [the death camp]. Finding ways to die was not difficult for a Jew."
Zigi was raised by his grandparents in the ghetto in Lódz that the Nazis established in November 1939. His mother, divorced from his father before the war, had moved to Belgium. "I presumed she was dead." He was wrong.
Food was so scarce in the ghetto that Zigi's grandfather became weak and died. Death was everywhere: "When I was 10 I stepped over dead bodies in the ghetto without much feeling." Ghetto life took on a routine for him and his grandmother. He worked in a metal factory producing munitions. But the routine was broken when, in 1941, the Nazis began to round up Jews for what they called "resettlement". On one of these raids, Zigi was slung into a lorry. "I managed to jump off – I ran and ran and luckily, no German saw me."
Zigi stops telling his story for a moment. "I feel [like] the luckiest person alive. I survived concentration camps, I jumped out of a lorry without being seen."
He was hospitalised for a mild heart attack aged 51. "While I was there I had a massive coronary. Let me tell you, the best place to have a coronary is in hospital. All my life I asked myself, why did I survive? My answer is: 95% of it was luck." Zigi celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this month. "If you had told me when I was a boy I would be alive at 60, let alone 80, I would have laughed at you."
In July 1944, the Nazis decided to liquidate the £ódz ghetto. Zigi and his grandmother found themselves on a cattle truck heading to a death camp. The first thing Zigi noticed when he got off the train at Auschwitz was that the sky was hazy. Then he noticed the terrible smell. "From a distance we saw chimneys with smoke coming out. Rumours started spreading that it was a crematorium. I still didn't know what that meant."
He was lined up for selection. To the left went the fit men, who showered, changed into a uniform and went to their barracks. Within an hour those who went to the right were gassed to death – women, children, disabled and elderly people. Again, Zigi was lucky: he was 15, fit enough to work. All but inexplicably, Shipper's grandmother survived the Auschwitz selections too.
Zigi soon left Auschwitz to work in a series of labour camps. But that didn't mean the horrors of the Holocaust were over for him. One day, while he was working in a railway yard, five men were caught stealing cigarettes. They were hanged in front of the whole camp. "Each one jumped off the stools they were put on so as not to give the Germans the satisfaction of knowing they killed them."
Zigi was liberated from his German captors by the British army on 3 May 1945. He ended up recuperating in a children's home in Germany. While there he received a letter with a British postmark. "It was from a woman telling me it was quite possible that I was her son.
She asked me to look at my left wrist to see if there was a burn mark, which she knew happened to me as a four-year-old. I knew then the letter was from my mother." He didn't, though, want to live with her. "She was a stranger to me – I hadn't see her since I was four."
But he went to London to meet her, and stayed. For all the love that Zigi now professes for Britain, he felt lonely in London. Then one day he went to a dance at a club for young Holocaust survivors in Belsize Park in London. "I looked round and thought, 'I know him from the ghetto, him from Auschwitz.' I felt as though I had found my family again." More than that: at the club he found a wife – a French Jewish woman called Jeanette to whom he has now been married for 55 years.
Years after the war he found out what had happened to his grandmother. "After Auschwitz, we were separated. I found out she died in Theresienstadt on the day of liberation. She didn't have one day of freedom. She was wonderful to me. I would have loved to put my arms around her for one last time."
He only returned to Poland about a decade ago. "I went to Auschwitz after being nagged by my children." He recalls standing under the "Arbeit macht frei" sign at the camp entrance, which was stolen and then recovered last year. "It meant nothing to me. I stood under that sign and said: 'After all that Hitler tried to do, he didn't succeed, for I am still here!'"
Polish Jews being moved out of the Warsaw ghetto by SS troops in April 1943. Photograph: AP
Sixty-five years ago tomorrow (28.01), the largest Nazi killing camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust will celebrate the anniversary of that event. So what, you might be thinking. Another anniversary, another wall of newsprint. What, really, is the point of continuing to commemorate something that happened a lifetime ago? There are three good reasons. One is, as all the survivors of the Holocaust I interviewed told me, that the slogan "Never again" has become a sick joke, degraded by the genocides in Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992), Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003- today). We have learned too little and let people die en masse not for what they did but for who they were – just as happened in the Nazi death camps.
Second reason: this is one of the last years we are going to have many Holocaust survivors in Britain to share with us what they went through. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust estimates there are 5,000 survivors left in the UK. It's urgent that we hear their – often incredible – stories before they die. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, there were 200,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, according to one source (Zoe Waxman's 2006 book Writing the Holocaust, Oxford University Press).
But Jews weren't the only victims, nor the Holocaust's only survivors: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, for instance, defines Holocaust survivors as "any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding." The museum has a registry that includes more than 196,000 records related to survivors and their families. Any estimate of the number of Holocaust survivors immediately after the war, though, is likely to be wrong, not least because no one then had as their first priority counting up the number of people who survived the death camps.
Third reason: many of the survivors I spoke to, while hopeful for Britain's future, drew parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the way ethnic minorities are treated in the UK today. As Carly Whyborn, chief executive officer of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, says: "Britain is not Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It is not Pol Pot's Cambodia. But on Holocaust Memorial Day we can pause to look at how we treat those around us. We can all make the choice to challenge exclusion when we see it happening – we can choose to stop using language that dehumanises others and we can stop our friends and family from dehumanising and excluding others." Otherwise, it might be added, we haven't really learned the lessons of the Holocaust or later genocides.
6th June Soldiers from the British and allied forces commemorate an historical landmark. June 6th, 1944 marked the begining of the end of World War ii with the liberation of france from occupation by Nazi forces, with the landing of allied forces on the beaches of normandy in northern France. it is remembered by veterans, now in their 80's and 90's, throughout the region. It is officially the last commemoration of the acts of heroism and suffering they endured.
www.dday.co.uk - 'this site is dedicated to the brave men, heroes one and all, who took part in the D-Day landings - 6th June 1944' on the Normandy Beaches, northern France.
Hostilities over the week-end have left the whole of the French front line inside German territory, in spite of heavy enemy counter-attacks on the Western Front. Some 350 square miles of Germany are now in French hands.
On the 70th anniversary of Britain declaring war, Joy Hunter recalls working in Churchill's War Rooms and attending the historic Potsdam conference of July 1945
During World War 2 thousands of children were evacuated from their homes and sent to safety in the countryside. These are photos taken during these evacuations.
A letter written by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the height of the Blitz reveals how close she and her husband, George VI, came to being killed in a bombing raid.
Public calm under stress of mobilisation and first air onslaughts
World War II - History Editors note: World War Two changed the course of World History forever. For the benefit of younger visitors, we have included this brief, illustrated history of events on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war. Also included is a time-line of events and those drawn into the conflict.
World War II
From top left: Marching German police during Anschluss, emaciated Jews in a concentration camp, Battle of Stalingrad, capture of Berlin by Soviets, Japanese troops in China, atomic bomb
World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII or WW2), was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all of the great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. The war involved the mobilization of over 100 million military personnel, making it the most widespread war in history. In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Over seventy million people, the majority of whom were civilians, were killed, making it the deadliest conflict in human history.
In 1945 the war ended in a victory for the Allies. The Soviet Union and the United States subsequently emerged as the world's superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. The United Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The acceptance of the principle of self-determination accelerated decolonization movements in Asia and Africa, while Western Europe itself began moving toward integration.
Time-line (right). Feature continues down the page
A variety of events led to the escalation of hostilities between the Axis and Allied powers prior to the start of the war. In the aftermath ofWorld War I, a defeated Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles. This caused Germany to lose around 13% of its territory, stripped Germany of its colonies, prohibited German annexation of other states, imposed massive reparations and limited the size and makeup of Germany's armed forces.
Before taking effect though, the Franco-Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, rendering it essentially toothless. In June 1935, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany easing prior restrictions. The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August. In October, Italy invaded Ethiopia, with Germany the only major European nation supporting her invasion. Italy then revoked objections to Germany's goal of making Austria a satellite state.
In direct violation of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936. He received little response from other European powers. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July, Hitler and Mussolini supported fascist Generalísimo Francisco Franco's nationalist forces in his civil war against the Soviet-supported Spanish Republic. Both sides used the conflict to test new weapons and methods of warfare and the nationalists would prove victorious in early 1939.
With tensions mounting, efforts to strengthen or consolidate power were made. In October, Germany and Italy formed the Rome-Berlin Axis and a month later Germany and Japan, each believing communism and the Soviet Union in particular to be a threat, signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy would join in the following year. In China, the Kuomintang and communist forces agreed on a ceasefire to present a united front to oppose Japan.
The start of the war is generally held to be September 1, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, although Britain and France entered two days later. Other dates for the beginning of war include the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on September 13, 1931 the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on July 7, 1937, or one of several other events. Other sources follow A. J. P. Taylor, who holds that there was a simultaneous Sino-Japanese War in East Asia, and a Second European War in Europe and her colonies, but they did not become a World War until they merged in 1941; at which point the war continued until 1945. This article uses the conventional dating.
The end of the War also has several dates. Some sources state that it ended at the armistice of August 14, 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945); in some European histories, it ended on V-E Day (May 8, 1945). The Treaty of Peace with Japan was not signed until 1951.
At the same time as the battle in Poland, Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by late September.
Throughout this period, the neutral United States took measures to assist China and the Western Allies. In November 1939, the American Neutrality Act was amended to allow 'Cash and carry' purchases by the Allies. In 1940, following the German capture of Paris, the size of the United States Navy was significantly increased and, after the Japanese incursion into Indochina, the United States embargoed iron, steel and mechanical parts against Japan. In September, the United States further agreed to a trade of American destroyers for British bases.Still, a large majority of the American public continued to oppose any direct military intervention into the conflict well into 1941.
At the end of September 1940, the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Italy and Germany formalized the Axis Powers. The pact stipulated that any country, with the exception of the Soviet Union, not in the war which attacked any Axis Power would be forced to go to war against all three. The Soviet Union expressed interest in joining the Tripartite Pact, sending a modified draft to Germany in November, offering a very German-favourable economic deal; while Germany remained silent on the former, they accepted the latter.Regardless of the pact, the United States continued to support the United Kingdom and China by introducing the Lend-Lease policy authorizing the provision of war materiel and other items and creating a security zone spanning roughly half of the Atlantic Ocean where the United States Navy protected British convoys. As a result, Germany and the United States found themselves engaged in sustained, if undeclared, naval warfare in the North and Central Atlantic by October 1941, even though the United States remained officially neutral.
The Allies did have some successes during this time though. In the Middle East, Commonwealth forces first quashed a coup in Iraq which had been supported by German aircraft from bases within Vichy-controlled Syria, then, with the assistance of the Free French, invaded Syria and Lebanon to prevent further such occurrences.
In the Atlantic, the British scored a much-needed public morale boost by sinking the German flagship Bismarck. Perhaps most importantly, during the Battle of Britain the Royal Air Force had successfully resisted the Luftwaffe's assault, and on May 11, 1941, Hitler called off the bombing campaign.
In Asia, in spite of several offensives by both sides, the war between China and Japan was stalemated by 1940. In August of that year, Chinese communists launched an offensive in Central China; in retaliation, Japan instituted harsh measures (the Three Alls Policy) in occupied areas to reduce human and material resources for the communists. Continued antipathy between Chinese communist and nationalist forces culminated in armed clashes in January 1941, effectively ending their co-operation.
With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union made preparations. With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia, the two powers signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April, 1941.By contrast the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, amassing forces on the Soviet border.
On June 22, 1941, Germany, along with other European Axis members and Finland, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The primary targets of this surprise offensive were the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with an ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the A-A line, the line connecting the Caspian and White Seas. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate Communism, generate so-called 'living space' by dispossessing the native population and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals.
Although before the war the Red Army was preparing for strategic counter-offensives,Barbarossa forced the Soviet supreme command to adopt a strategic defence. During the summer, the Axis made significant gains into Soviet territory, inflicting immense losses in personnel and matériel. However, by the middle of August, the German Army High Command decided to suspend the offensive of a considerably depleted Army Group Center, and to divert the Second Panzer Group to reinforce troops advancing toward central Ukraine and Leningrad. The Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four Soviet armies, and made further advance into Crimea and industrially developed Eastern Ukraine (the First Battle of Kharkov) possible.
Khreshchatyk, the main street of Kiev, after German bombardment.
The diversion of three quarters of the Axis troops and the majority of their air forces from France and the central Mediterranean to the Eastern Front prompted the United Kingdom to reconsider its grand strategy. In July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance against Germany and shortly after jointly invaded Iran to secure the Persian Corridor and Iran's oilfields. In August, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly issued the Atlantic Charter.
By October, when Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol continuing, a major offensive against Moscow had been renewed. After two months of fierce battles, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, where the exhausted troops were forced to suspend their offensive. Despite impressive territorial gains, the Axis campaign had failed to achieve its main objectives: two key cities remained in Soviet hands, the Soviet capability to resist was not broken, and the Soviet Union retained a considerable part of its military potential. The blitzkriegphase of WWII in Europe had ended.
By early December, freshly mobilized reserves allowed the Soviets to achieve numerical parity with Axis troops.This, as well as intelligence data that established a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East sufficient to prevent any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army, allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on December 5 along a 1000 km front and pushed German troops 100–250 km west.
Japan had seized military control of southern Indochina the previous year, partly to increase pressure on China by blocking supply routes, but also to better position Japanese forces in the event of a war with the western powers. Japan, hoping to capitalize on Germany's success in Europe, made several demands, including a steady supply of oil, of the Dutch East Indies; these attempts, however, broke down in June 1941. The United States, United Kingdom and other western governments reacted to the seizure of Indochina with a freeze on Japanese assets, while the United States (which supplied 80% of Japan's oil) responded by placing a complete oil embargo. Thus Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in Asia and the prosecution of the war against China, or seizing the natural resources it needed by force; the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.
Japanese Imperial General Headquarters thus planned to rapidly seize European colonies in Asia to create a large defensive perimeter stretching into the Central Pacific; the Japanese would then be free to exploit the resources of Southeast Asia while exhausting the over-stretched Allies by fighting a defensive war. To prevent American intervention while securing the perimeter it was further planned to neutralize the United States Pacific Fleet from the outset.
These attacks prompted the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, other western Allies and China (already fighting the Second Sino-Japanese War), to formally declare war on Japan. Germany and the other members of the Tripartite Pact responded by declaring war on the United States. In January, the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, China and twenty-two smaller or exiled governments issued the Declaration by United Nations which affirmed the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Union did not adhere to the declaration, maintained a neutrality agreement with Japan and exempted itself from the principle of self-determination.
Germany retained the initiative as well. Exploiting dubious American naval command decisions, the German navyravaged Allied shipping off the American Atlantic coast.Despite considerable losses, European Axis members stopped a major Soviet offensive in Central and Southern Russia, keeping most territorial gains they achieved during the previous year. In North Africa, the Germans launched an offensive in January, pushing the British back to positions at the Gazala Line by early February, followed by a temporary lull in combat which Germany used to prepare for their upcoming offensives.
With its capacity for aggressive action greatly diminished as a result of the Midway battle, Japan chose to focus on a belated attempt to capture Port Moresby by an overland campaign in the Territory of Papua. The Americans planned a counterattack against Japanese positions in the southern Solomon Islands, primarily Guadalcanal, as a first step towards capturing Rabaul, the main Japanese base in Southeast Asia.
Both plans started in July, but by mid-September, the battle for Guadalcanal took priority for the Japanese, and troops in New Guinea were ordered to withdraw from the Port Moresby area to the northern part of the island, where they faced Australian and United States troops in the Battle of Buna-Gona.Guadalcanal soon became a focal point for both sides with heavy commitments of troops and ships in the battle for Guadalcanal. By the start of 1943, the Japanese were defeated on the island and withdrew their troops.
In Burma (Mayanmar), Commonwealth forces mounted two operations. The first, an offensive into the Arakan region in late 1942 went disastrously, forcing a retreat back to India by May 1943. The second was the insertion of irregular forces behind Japanese front-lines in February which, by the end of April, had achieved dubious results.
By early February 1943, the German Army had taken tremendous losses; German troops at Stalingrad had been forced to surrender and the front-line had been pushed back beyond its position before the summer offensive. In mid-February, after the Soviet push had tapered off, the Germans launched another attack on Kharkov, creating a salient in their front-line around the Russian city of Kursk.
By November 1941, Commonwealth forces had launched a counter-offensive, Operation Crusader, in North Africa, and reclaimed all the gains the Germans and Italians had made.
In the west, concerns the Japanese might utilize bases in Vichy-held Madagascar caused the British to invade the island in early May, 1942. This success was offset soon after by an Axis offensive in Libya which pushed the Allies back into Egypt until Axis forces were stopped at El Alamein. On the Continent, raids of Allied commandos on strategic targets, culminating in the disastrous Dieppe Raid, demonstrated the Western allies' inability to launch an invasion of continental Europe without much better preparation, equipment, and operational security.
Hitler responded to the French colony's defection by ordering the occupation of Vichy France; though Vichy forces did not resist this violation of the armistice, they managed to scuttle their fleet to prevent its capture by German forces. The now pincered Axis forces in Africa withdrew into Tunisia, which was conquered by the Allies by May 1943.
In the Soviet Union, both the Germans and the Soviets spent the spring and early summer of 1943 making preparations for large offensives in Central Russia. On July 4, 1943, Germany attacked Soviet forces in the region of the Kursk Bulge. Within a week, German forces had exhausted themselves against the Soviets' deeply echeloned and well-constructed defenses and, for the first time in the war, Hitler canceled the operation before it had achieved tactical or operational success.
This decision was partially affected by the Western Allies' invasion of Sicily launched on July 9 which, combined with previous Italian failures, resulted in the ousting and arrest of Mussolini later that month. On July 12, 1943, the Soviets launched their own counter-offensives, thereby dispelling any hopes of the German Army for victory or even stalemate in the east. The Germans attempted to stabilize their eastern front along the hastily fortified Panther-Wotan line, however, the Soviets broke it at Smolensk and by the Lower Dnieper Offensives.
German operations in the Atlantic also suffered. By May 1943, as Allied counter-measures became increasingly effective, the resulting sizable German submarine losses forced a temporary halt of the German Atlantic naval campaign. In November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met with Chiang Kai-shekin Cairo and then with Joseph Stalin in Tehran. The former conference determined the post-war return of Japanese territory, while the latter included agreement that the Western Allies would invade Europe in 1944 and that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan within three months of Germany's defeat.
By late May 1944, the Soviets had liberated Crimea, largely expelled Axis forces from Ukraine and made incursions into Romania, which were repulsed by the Axis troops. The Allied offensives in Italy had succeeded and, at the expense of allowing several German divisions to retreat, on June 4 Rome was captured.
The Allies experienced mixed fortunes in mainland Asia. In March 1944, the Japanese launched the first of two invasions, an operation against British positions in Assam, India, and soon besieged Commonwealth positions at Imphal and Kohima.In May 1944, British forces mounted a counter-offensive that drove Japanese troops back to Burma, and Chinese forces that had invaded Northern Burma in late 1943 besieged Japanese troops in Myitkyina.The second Japansese invasion attempted to destroy China's main fighting forces, secure railways between Japanese-held territory and capture Allied airfields. By June, the Japanese had conquered the province of Henan and begun a renewed attack against Changsha in the Hunan province.
By the start of July, Commonwealth forces in Southeast Asia had repelled the Japanese sieges in Assam, pushing the Japanese back to the Chindwin River, while the Chinese captured Myitkyina. In China, the Japanese were having greater successes, having finally captured Changsha in mid-June and the city of Hengyang by early August. Soon after, they further invaded the province of Guangxi, winning major engagements against Chinese forces at Guilin and Liuzhou by the end of November and successfully linking up their forces in China and Indochina by the middle of December.
In the Pacific, American forces continued to press back the Japanese perimeter. In mid-June 1944 they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands, scoring a decisive victory against Japanese forces in the Philippine Sea within a few days. These defeats led to the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Tôjô and provided the United States with air bases to launch intensive heavy bomber attacks on the Japanese home islands. In late October, American forces invaded the Filipino island of Leyte; soon after, Allied naval forces scored another large victory during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history.
Axis collapse, Allied victory
On December 16, 1944, Germany attempted its last desperate measure for success by marshaling German reserves to launch a massive counteroffensive in the Ardennes to attempt to split the Western Allies, encircle large portions of Western Allied troops and capture their primary supply port at Antwerp in order to prompt a political settlement.The offensive was spearheaded by Germany's top army group and over one million total soldiers fought in the battles. The offensive had been repulsed by January with no strategic objectives fulfilled. The Soviets attacked through Hungary, while the Germans abandoned Greece and Albania, and were driven out of southern Yugoslavia by partisans.
On February 4, U.S., British, and Soviet leaders met in Yalta. They agreed on the occupation of post-war Germany, and when the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan.
In the Pacific theater, American forces advanced in the Philippines, clearing Leyte by the end of 1944. They landed on Luzon in January 1945 and Mindanao in March. British and Chinese forces defeated the Japanese in northern Burma from October to March, then the British pushed on to Rangoon by May 3. American forces also moved toward Japan, taking Iwo Jima by March, and Okinawa by June. American bombers destroyed Japanese cities, and American submarines cut off Japanese imports.
In an effort to maintain international peace,the Allies formed the United Nations, which officially came into existence on October 24, 1945.
The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union had begun to deteriorate even before the war was over, and the two powers each quickly established their own spheres of influence. In Europe, the continent was essentially divided between Western and Soviet spheres by the so-called Iron Curtain which ran through and partitioned Allied occupied Germany and occupied Austria. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries it occupied as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, such as Eastern Poland, the three Baltic countries, part of eastern Finland and northeastern Romania.
Soon after the end of World War II, conflict flared again in many parts of the world. In China, nationalist and communist forces quickly resumed their civil war. Communist forces were eventually victorious and established the People's Republic of China on the mainland while nationalist forces ended up retreating to the reclaimed island of Taiwan. In Greece, civil war broke out between Anglo-American supported royalist forces and communist forces, with the royalist forces victorious. Soon after these conflicts ended, North Korea invadedSouth Korea, which was backed by the United Nations,while North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union and China.
The war resulted in essentially a stalemate and ceasefire, after which North Korean leader Kim Il Sung created a highly centralized and brutal dictatorship, according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality.
Following the end of the war, a rapid period of decolonization also took place within the holdings of the various European colonial powers. These primarily occurred due to shifts in ideology, the economic exhaustion from the war and increased demand by indigenous people for self-determination. For the most part, these transitions happened relatively peacefully, though notable exceptions occurred in countries such as Indochina, Madagascar, Indonesia and Algeria.
Economic recovery following the war was varied in differing parts of the world, though in general it was quite positive. In Europe, West Germanyrecovered quickly and doubled production from its pre-war levels by the 1950s. Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition, but by 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth.
The United Kingdom was in a state of economic ruin after the war, and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow. France rebounded quite quickly, and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernization. The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era.
In Asia, Japan experienced incredibly rapid economic growth, and led to Japan becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s. China, following the conclusion of its civil war, was essentially a bankrupt nation. By 1953 economic restoration seemed fairly successful as production had resumed pre-war levels. This growth rate mostly persisted, though it was briefly interrupted by the disastrous Great Leap Forward economic experiment. At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of the world's industrial output; by the early 1970s though, this dominance had lessened significantly.
Estimates for the total casualties of the war vary, but most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians.
Many civilians died because of disease, starvation, massacres, bombing and deliberate genocide. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties. Of the total deaths in World War II, approximately 85 percent were on the Allied side (mostly Soviet and Chinese) and 15 percent on the Axis side.
One estimate is that 12 million civilians died in Nazi concentration camps, 1.5 million by bombs, 7 million in Europe from other causes, and 7.5 million in China from other causes.Figures on the amount of total casualties vary to a wide extent because the majority of deaths were not documented.
Many of these deaths were a result of genocidal actions committed in Axis-occupied territories and other war crimes committed by German as well as Japanese forces. The most notorious of German atrocities was The Holocaust, the systematic genocide of Jews in territories controlled by Germany and its allies.
The Nazis also targeted other groups, including the Roma (targeted in the Porajmos), Slavs, and gay men, exterminating an estimated five million additional people. The targets of the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustaðe regime were mostly Serbs.
The best-known Japanese atrocity is the Nanking (Nanjing) Massacre, in which several hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered. The Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 million to over 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese. According to Mitsuyoshi Himeta, at least 2.7 million died during the Sankô Sakusen implemented in Heipei and Shantung by General Yasuji Okamura.
In addition to Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulags, or labor camps, led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of war (POWs) and even Soviet citizens who had been or were thought to be supporters of the Nazis. Sixty percent of Soviet POWs of the Germans died during the war.Richard Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POWs. Of those, 57% died or were killed, a total of 3.6 million. Some of the survivors on their return to the USSR were treated as traitors. (See Order No. 270)
Body disposal at Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare research unit
Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many of which were used as labour camps, also had high death rates. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1 percent (for American POWs, 37 percent), seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians
The death rate among Chinese POWs was much larger; a directive ratified on August 5, 1937 by Hirohito declared that the Chinese were no longer protected under international law. While 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from the, Netherlands and 14,473 from United States were released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56.
According to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the East Asia Development Board for slave labor in Manchukuo and north China. The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual laborers"), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia, and only 52,000 were repatriated to Java.
Allied use of involuntary labour occurred mainly in the east, such as in Poland, but more than a million was also put to work in the west.
Exclusive: The unseen photographs that throw new light on the First World War. A treasure trove of First
World War photographs was discovered recently in France. Published
here for the first time, they show British soldiers on their way to the
Somme. But who took them? And who were these Tommies marching off to
die?
The place, according
to a jokingly chalked board, is "somewhere in France". The time is the
winter of 1915 and the spring and summer of 1916.
Hundreds of thousands
of British and Empire soldiers, are preparing for The Big Push, the
biggest British offensive of the 1914-18 war to date.
A local French
photographer, almost certainly an amateur, possibly a farmer, has
offered to take pictures for a few francs. Soldiers have queued to have
a photograph taken to send back to their anxious but proud families in
Britain or Australia or New Zealand.
Sometimes, the
Tommies are snapped individually in front of the same battered door or
in a pear and apple orchard. Sometimes they are photographed on
horseback or in groups of comrades. A pretty six-year-old girl – the
photographer's daughter? – occasionally stands with the soldiers or
sits on their knees: a reminder of their families, of human tenderness
and of a time when there was no war.
Many of the British
soldiers are wearing rough sheepskins over their battle-dress: a
tell-tale sign of the great overcoat shortage of the winter of 1915.
The sheepskin-clad "Tommies" look, bizarrely, like ancient warriors or
Greek or Yugoslav partisans.
Within a few months –
or days, most probably – many of the soldiers were dead. The "somewhere
in France" where these pictures were taken was a village called
Warloy-Baillon in the département of the Somme. Ten miles to the east
was the front line from which the British Army launched the most
murderous battle of that, or any, war, which lasted from 1 July to late
November 1916 and killed an estimated 1,000,000 British empire, French
and German soldiers.
More than 90 years
later, at least 400 glass photographic plates preserving the images
were found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baillon and cast out as
rubbish. In recent months, the plates, some in perfect condition, some
badly damaged, have been lovingly assembled and their images printed,
scanned and digitally restored by two Frenchmen.
Together, they form a
poignant record of the British army on the eve of, or during, the
battle of the Somme: the smiling, the scared, the scruffy, the smart,
the formal, the jokey, the short, the tall, the young and the old.
There is even an image of a 1914-18 war phenomenon which was rarely
photographed and scarcely ever mentioned: a black Tommy in artillery
uniform, with two white comrades.
The Independent
Magazine publishes a large selection of the images here for the first
time. More of the collection, including a few images of French
civilians and soldiers, and possibly the photographer and his family,
can be seen on The Independent website.
Who are these British
and British Empire soldiers? Who was the photographer? Who was the
little girl? From internal evidence in the pictures it is possible to
identify the period and some of the military units – The Northumberland
Fusiliers, the Tramways' Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders, the
Royal Leicestershire Regiment, the Royal Army Service Corps, the Royal
Flying Corps, the Royal Engineers, a few Australians, a South African,
a lone New Zealander.
The identity of the
soldiers is, and may always remain, a mystery. They are, in a sense, a
photographic parallel to the 400 unknown British and Australian
soldiers now being excavated from eight mass graves near Fromelles, 50
miles to the north. Including the figures in the group photos, well
over 400 unknown Tommy faces come back to us through the mists of time
and battle.
Most First World War
photographs show smart soldiers before leaving home for the front or
exhausted soldiers during or just after combat. Here we see the clear
and often modern-looking features of soldiers at rest, either before –
or in some cases, it seems – just after fighting in the trenches to the
east.
Many of the images
show medical orderlies. Warloy-Baillon was the site of a large
hospital, taken over by the British Army. Other soldiers were evidently
photographed while in reserve, or engaged in behind-the-line tasks, or
after recovering from minor wounds.
There are several
gems. Who is the "black Tommy"? There was already a small black
community in Britain in 1914 – in Cardiff, in Liverpool and in the
North East. Black men are known to have volunteered and fought in the
trenches, but very few photographs of them exist.
Who, also, is the
giant of a British soldier, possibly as much as seven feet tall,
sitting in front of two standard-sized comrades? Who was the Tommy who
asked the photographer to take a picture of his back, which has been
elaborately tattooed with the faces of the British royal family? Why is
one group of soldiers holding a large rag doll?
The survival of the
images is owed to two local men: Bernard Gardin, aged 60, a photography
enthusiast; and Dominique Zanardi, 49, proprietor of the "Tommy" café
at Pozières, a village in the heart of the Somme battlefields.
M. Gardin was given a
batch of about 270 glass plates by someone who knew of his hobby. He
approached M. Zanardi, who has a collection of Great War memorabilia,
including a football dug up 12 years ago inside a British soldier's
rucksack. M. Zanardi, it turned out, already had 130 similar plates
which he had gathered from other local people.
"About three years
ago, someone bought a barn near Warloy-Baillon," M. Zanardi said. "They
found the glass plates in the loft and just threw them out as rubbish.
Many of them were picked up and taken away by passers-by. I started
collecting them and had reached over 100 when M. Gardin turned up with
this great batch of 270. They must also, originally, have come from the
same source. There may be many more out there which we have not yet
been found."
M. Gardin and M.
Zanardi have had prints made, at their own expense, from the original
plates. M. Gardin describes these as "9 x 12 centimetre glass plates,
of the kind used at the time by amateur photographers. A professional
would have used a camera with bigger plates, 18 centimetres x 24."
Amateur or not, the
quality of many of the images turned out to be excellent. Some plates,
however, had been damaged. M. Gardin scanned the prints into a computer
and set about digitally restoring the images. "If it's just a question
of filling in a wall or part of a uniform,
it's quite easy," he said.
"Faces, and especially eyes, are very tricky."
Prints of more than
100 of the unknown soldiers have now been framed and exhibited in M.
Zanardi's café in Pozières. Others will join them when they are ready.
M. Zanardi's attempts
to identify the photographer and the images of French civilians, and a
handful of French soldiers, have got nowhere. "My belief is that he
lived close to the barn where the plates were found," he said. "He may
have been a farmer. The plates were just stacked up after he printed
photographs from them and then forgotten for more than 90 years."
M. Gardin told me:
"We think that they form an important, and moving, historical record.
Our motive in restoring them was not financial. It was a tribute to all
the British soldiers who fought here and also to an unknown
photographer."
Identical copies of
these images must have been sent home to mothers and wives and
sweethearts in late 1915 and the first half of 1916. Will someone out
there recognise their Great Grandad or their Great Uncle Bill?
Although
some research has been conducted into the photographs, much hard work
is yet to be done. Such compelling images must have a story attached;
and with your help we hope to uncover as much of their fascinating
history as possible. Click here to see how you can help.
Editors note: If you have information, but are not able to gain access to the links, send your contribution to us on: enjoyingenglishinfo@yahoo.com and write 'WW1' in the subject box, and we will forward it.
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St Paul's cathedral in London during the blitz in World War II. Credit: Popperfoto 
Zigi Shipper, Holocaust survivor Photograph: David Levene
Polish Jews being moved out of the Warsaw ghetto by SS troops in April 1943. Photograph: AP
By John Lichfield 22.05.2009.
Click here to view the exclusive photographs
