Abstract
In the early hours of 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland on land and from the air. Two days later, on 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second Great War of the twentieth century — the greatest single slaughter in history — had begun.
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Notes
See David Kaiser, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, Princeton, NJ, 1980.
See S. Marks, The Illusion of Peace: 1918–1933, New York, 1976.
See J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, New York, 1920, which did much to create the legend of the ‘Carthaginian Peace’ imposed on the Germans at Versailles. See also M. Trachtenberg, Reparations in World Politics, New York, 1980.
See ‘Great Men in History’, Chapter 7, Morris R. Cohen, The Meaning of Human History, New York, 1947.
Before 1938 the term was commonly understood to mean a necessary and desirable relation between nations. See Andrew J. Crozier, Appeasement and Germany’s Last Bid for Colonies, London, 1988.
See Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi—Soviet Pact 1939–1941, London, 1988. In 1940 the USSR forcibly annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Finland, attacked in the winter of 1939, offered heroic resistance, but by March 1940 was forced to accept Russia’s terms. Because it had violated the Covenant, the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations on 14 December 1939.
See Lieutenant Commander P.K. Kemp, RN (Ret.), Key to Victory, Boston, 1958, p. 26.
See H.G. Dahms, Die Geschichte des zweiten Weltkrieges, Munich, 1983, p. 211, note 64. German civilian deaths from Allied bombing were in the region of 570,000, p. 621, note 15.
See A. Clark, Barbarossa, The Russo-German Conflict, 1941–1945, London 1965.
See W.H. Baldwin, Battles Lost and Won, New York, 1966, pp. 112–13.
See John Toland, Infamy, Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, New York, 1982. Toland argues that Roosevelt and his top advisers knew about the planned attack but remained silent in order to draw the US into the war. Major damage was done to US aircraft and battleships, but the fleet’s aircraft carriers were out of harbour. More recent writers have suggested that code-breaking was involved. Washington wished to conceal the fact that it had already broken the Japanese codes.
Although none of the Japanese victories had a crippling effect on overall allied strategy. See C. Bateson, The War with Japan, East Lancing, Mich., 1968.
See Arno J. Mayer, Why did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History, New York, 1989. Also Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German Identity, Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Also Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ‘Perversions of the Holocaust’, Commentary, October 1989.
Said Jackson: ‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.’ Robert H. Jackson, ‘Opening Address’, in Trial of German War Criminals, Senate Doc. no. 129, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1946, p. 1. Twelve of the accused at Nuremberg, and seven in Japan, were sentenced to death by hanging.
See Ann and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial, New York, 1984; also, R.H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Princeton, NJ, 1971.
The author of America’s policy of containment was the US ambassador to the USSR, George F. Kennan. See his article signed ‘X’ in Foreign Affairs, July 1947.
Proposed in 1947 by US Secretary of State, General George Marshall (1880–1959), it provided western European countries (the aid was rejected by the Soviet bloc; Poland was ordered by the Kremlin to withdraw its application for aid) with $13.5 billion of economic and financial assistance. Introduced in 1948, Marshall Aid was discontinued in 1952. See Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan, Cambridge, 1987.
See Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Blockade, London, 1988.
On 20 May 1989, India became the first third world nation to admit developing an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
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© 2002 Helga Woodruff
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Woodruff, W. (2002). The Second World War: 1939–45. In: A Concise History of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554665_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554665_14
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