Chapter Summary
In September 1939, Europe witnessed yet another global conflict, this one perhaps more deadly than the Great War. The framers of the peace settlement at Versailles carved up Central and Eastern Europe without regard for its ethnic or linguistic borders. As a result, old tensions were given new life. Although the great powers of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were dissolved, a new conflict was beginning to take shape with decidedly different origins and profoundly different consequences. The Second World War was no continuation of the first. The nineteenth century had passed. This was a new war.
The Second World War was Hitler's war. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through legal channels in January 1933, Europe was on the verge of facing its greatest threat. Germany was both demoralized and debilitated by Versailles; it was overcome by inflation and massive unemployment, and Hitler and the Nazi Party promised regeneration. With the memories of the Great War foremost in their minds, Britain and France stood down and appeased Hitler as he reoccupied the Ruhr, annexed Austria, and marched his troops into the Sudetenland. In the meantime, Hitler's storm troopers paraded through the streets of every town in Germany, loudspeakers blaring the Nazi ideology of racial hatred, Aryan supremacy, and the master race. Hitler, der Führer, had come to deliver them from the humiliation that was Versailles and into the thousand-year Third Reich.
But the Third Reich was markedly short-lived. After Hitler marched into Poland, the British and French declared war. The United States cautiously waited until an unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, made their entry into the war necessary. Meanwhile, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The war raged on for more than five years, until the German will to power had finally been broken. The military-industrial machine of the United States was no match for Hitler's Third Reich. Hitler committed suicide and on May 7, 1945, the German High Command signed the document of unconditional surrender.
The war in the Pacific raged on until Harry Truman ordered the delivery of a nuclear weapon over the skies of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Within fifteen minutes of the blast, 75,000 Japanese people had been vaporized. Science had proven itself to be the ultimate deciding force.
The world would never be the same. The memories of war were real for both citizen and soldier. This was a war of absolutes, a war of good versus evil. And the Second World War would shape the lives of men and women for the remainder of the twentieth century.