The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Uniforms of World War II
This is from my introductory text to the book, here looking at the aftermath of this global conflict:
The Germans had surrendered to the western allies at Reims on 7 May 1945, and signed a universal surrender the next day in Berlin. Europe lay in ruins. The total number of casualties can never be completely assessed. The Soviet Union lost more than 25 million people out of a June 1941 population of 196 million. Of these 9 million were military personnel, out of a total of 35 million mobilised. China had suffered similar losses in eight years of war, and would continue to suffer as world war blended into civil war. It was a heavy reckoning. Poland, too, had been crushed by the war, the heaviest toll falling on its civilian population (5.3 million casualties out of 5.4 million in total). Yugoslavia, torn apart by a vicious war, was also devastated.
Germany had lost 9 million dead, the majority being military personnel but also 3.8 million civilians killed by Allied bombing and in the final months of war, occupation and defeat. Japan, firebombed and blitzed, then pulverised by atomic ordnance, lost 2 million dead. Italy, Britain and the United States suffered casualties in the 400,000s. The Holocaust claimed 5.8 million victims, mostly Jewish citizens of Poland and the USSR. In addition, a similar number of individuals died or were executed in German camps, most of these (3.5 million) being Soviet prisoners of war (the first gassings at Auschwitz were experiments on such prisoners).
In all some 60 million people lost their lives. The war also brought economic ruin for many countries, an infrastructure which had been torn apart and civilian populations which had been traumatised, dispersed or severely weakened. The Marshall Plan, which was later launched in western Europe, was designed to rebuild Europe’s economies, and put a break on any post-war swing to the left.
The defeated had been broken but punishment was still to be levied against the perpetrators. Germany was to be demilitarised (also losing its merchant fleet) and split into zones of occupation. Berlin was within the Soviet zone but, similarly, was divided into Soviet, French, British and American zones. Germany was to pay reparations, submit to de-nazification and allow the settlement of Germans expelled from the east. Austria too was divided into zones of influence, but reunited in 1955 when the occupying powers withdrew peacefully. Japan was also to lose its military, and was to be reformed as a democracy (although it kept its imperial family). A peace treaty was signed in Paris in 1947 which allowed the minor Axis nations (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy plus Finland) back into the community of nations, granting them the right to join the United Nations (Germany, East and West, were not granted this privilege until 1973). This was even though most of these countries had surrendered and changed sides in 1943 and 1944. War reparations were to be made (Italy was to pay the most, Bulgaria the least), Italy was to lose its colonial empire and borders were to be adjusted.
This redrawing of borders was significant. Italy lost territory to Greece and Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union absorbed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and kept Bessarabia and parts of Ruthenia. It also established an enclave around Königsberg (renaming the capital of East Prussia into Kaliningrad). Germany was split into two by 1949. Perhaps the most significant change concerned Poland. The Allies agreed that the Polish-Soviet border should be along the Curzon Line which had established a border before the Bolshevik-Polish War of 1919. This would have reduced Poland but to compensate her she was given Danzig, much of Prussia, the resource-rich parts of Saxony and even Stettin. This Oder-Neisse line forms the current Polish-German border.
The new border arrangements were overshadowed by a more significant divide. The conduct of the war had been scattered with examples of mistrust between the big three but the situation came to a head in 1945. There would be a new balance of power in the world, but, with the Axis defeated, the west saw the Soviet Union as the next ideological enemy, a feeling which was reciprocated. The Yalta Conference had actually set out what would happen in Europe but the situation reverted to the mistrust and hostility of the inter-war period. The west did what it could to undermine the USSR, and the USSR did its best to weaken the west and strengthen its position in eastern Europe. The situation in the west was complicated by the fact that many of the liberation movements which had fought the Axis were left-wing, and pro-Soviet. These would be suppressed (brutally) in Greece, undermined in Italy and marginalised in France. They flourished, however, in Asia and were soon in conflict with the imperial powers in Korea, Vietnam and China.
Within the shadow of the new ideological divide, and having being stirred to life by conflict, an older process was gaining strength. Europe’s colonies had gained a measure of self-governance, and colonial subjects had been granted additional rights and responsibilities. With Europe exhausted, it was only a matter of time before imperial possessions became independent states in their own right. Jordan was the first (and Israel and Syria would emerge from mandated territories), but then India (and Pakistan) was a more significant step and this momentum continued in Asia in the 1950s and then in Africa in the 1960s. A new world order emerged from the ruins of the old.