The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

Nazi officials estimated that by 29 January ‘around four million people from the evacuated areas’ were heading for the centre of the Reich. This figure appears to have been too low, since it rose to seven million within a fortnight and to 8.35 million by 19 February. The Red Army’s rampage had produced the most concentrated shift of population in history. This ethnic cleansing suited Stalin perfectly, with his plans to shift the Polish border westwards to the Oder.

The Japanese naval and army defenders, knowing that they were all going to die, massacred Filipinos and raped the women mercilessly before killing them. Despite MacArthur’s refusal to use aircraft in an attempt to spare civilian lives, around 100,000 Manila citizens, more than one in eight of the population, died in the fighting which lasted until 3 March.

Japanese troops had inflicted half a million casualties on the Nationalist armies and forced them to withdraw from eight provinces, with a combined population of more than 100 million people. Yet it also represented a triumph for the Communists. The Nationalists had lost not only more food-producing areas, but also a large part of their manpower reserve for conscription. However much they hated the Japanese, this must have come as a relief to the local inhabitants. As General Wedemeyer observed: ‘Conscription comes to the Chinese peasant like famine and flood, only more regularly.’

The 334 Superfortresses carpet-bombed Tokyo, sparing neither residential nor industrial zones. More than a quarter of a million buildings went up in flames spread by strong winds. Houses made of wood and paper caught fire in seconds. Altogether 83,000 people died and another 41,000 were severely injured, a far greater toll than when the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki five months later.

The eastern border along the Curzon Line had been more or less agreed between the Big Three, but Roosevelt, rather to Churchill’s surprise, appealed to Stalin to allow the Poles to keep the city of Lwów as a generous gesture. Stalin had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It belonged to Ukraine, in his view, and, although Poles within the city were in an absolute majority, ethnic cleansing had already started. He intended to move them all to the eastern parts of Germany with which he proposed to compensate Poland. The citizens of Lwów would eventually be moved en masse to Breslau, which would become Wrocław.

Stalin became agitated during these discussions. After a recess, he suddenly stood up to speak. He admitted that the Russians had ‘committed many sins against the Poles in the past’, but argued that Poland was vital to Soviet security. The Soviet Union had been invaded twice through Poland in the course of the century, and for that reason alone it was necessary that Poland be ‘mighty, free, and independent’. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could fully understand the shock of the German invasion in 1941 and Stalin’s determination to establish a cordon of satellite states so that the Russians would never be surprised again. One could well argue that the origins of the Cold War lay in that traumatic experience.

The President agreed to Stalin’s price for entering the war against Japan. In the Far East, the Soviet Union wanted the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands which Russia had lost after the disastrous war against Japan in 1905. Roosevelt also conceded Soviet control over Mongolia, providing it was kept secret as he had not discussed it with Chiang Kai-shek. This was hardly in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, nor was the American compromise over Poland, announced by Stettinius on 9 February.

After the destruction of Dresden questions were raised, both in Britain and the United States. There were allegations that the Allied air forces had adopted a policy of ‘terror bombing’. Churchill, who had urged the attack on Dresden and other communications centres in eastern Germany, began to have cold feet about the ‘fury’ of the strategic bombing campaign. He sent a minute to the British chiefs of staff, stating that ‘the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing’. Portal found this deeply hypocritical and demanded that he withdraw it.

Rather more to the point was the knowledge of senior Nazis that they would be executed for war crimes. Hitler had no illusions. Surrender in any form was anathema to him, and his entourage knew that the war could not end as long as he still lived. Hitler’s greatest fear was not execution, but of being captured and taken back to Moscow in a cage. His plan had always been to implicate the military and civilian hierarchy in the crimes of the Nazi state, so that they could not dissociate themselves from it when there was no further hope.

Stalin’s main fear was that the Germans would open their western front to the British and Americans, and transfer troops east to face the Red Army. His paranoia led him to suspect that the western Allies were still capable of making a secret deal with Germany. American talks in Berne with SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, discussing a possible surrender in north Italy, had aroused his worst fears. On 27 March, just before the Stavka plans were finalized, a Reuters report from 21st Army Group boasted that British and American troops were meeting hardly any German resistance.

Ever since the Teheran conference at the end of 1943 when Stalin, supported by Roosevelt, had defined Allied strategy in the west, Europe was bound to be divided in Stalin’s favour. The western Allies were finding that they could liberate half of Europe only at the cost of re-enslaving the other half.

The two main Berlin hospitals, the Charité and the Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria, put the number of women raped at between 95,000 and 130,000. Most had suffered attacks many times. One doctor estimated that around 10,000 had died, either as a result of gang-rape or from suicide later. A number of daughters had been encouraged to kill themselves by their fathers to wipe out the ‘dishonour’. Altogether on German territory some two million women and girls are thought to have been raped. East Prussia had seen by far the worst violence, as numerous reports from NKVD commanders to Beria confirm.

The Berlin Operation, from 16 April to 2 May, had cost Zhukov’s, Konev’s and Rokossovsky’s fronts a total of 352,425 casualties, of whom nearly a third were killed. The 1st Belorussian Front had suffered the worst losses because of Zhukov’s desperation on the Seelow Heights.

The population of the Gulag and of forced-labour battalions swelled to its largest level. The new convicts included both civilians and an estimated three million Red Army soldiers, sentenced for having collaborated as Hiwis, or simply for having surrendered. Large numbers of others, including eleven generals, were executed after brutal interrogations at the screening centres run by SMERSh and the NKVD. Abandoned by incompetent or terrified superiors in 1941, Soviet soldiers had starved in the indescribable horrors of German camps. Now they found themselves treated as ‘traitors of the Motherland’ because they had failed to kill themselves. Those who survived this second round of punishment remained branded for the rest of their lives and restricted to the most menial work. Right up until 1998, well after the fall of Communism, official forms continued to demand details on any member of an applicant’s family who had been a prisoner of war. The bloody revolts which took place in Gulag camps in the years after the war were almost all led by former Red Army officers and men.

As the conference progressed, Stalin’s desire to extend Soviet power in many directions became abundantly apparent. He showed an interest in Italian colonies in Africa, and proposed that the Allies should have Franco removed. Churchill’s worst fears would have been aroused if he had overheard an exchange between Averell Harriman and Stalin during one break. ‘It must be very pleasant for you’, Harriman said, making conversation, ‘to be in Berlin now after all your country has suffered.’ The Soviet leader eyed him. ‘Tsar Aleksandr went all the way to Paris,’ he replied.

a meeting of the Politburo in 1944 had decided to order the Stavka to plan for the invasion of France and Italy, as General Shtemenko later told Beria’s son. The Red Army offensive was to be combined with a seizure of power by the local Communist Parties. In addition, Shtemenko explained, ‘a landing in Norway was provided for, as well as the seizure of the Straits [with Denmark]. A substantial budget was allocated for the realisation of these plans. It was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be paralysed by their colonial problems. The Soviet Union possessed 400 experienced divisions, ready to bound forward like tigers. It was calculated that the whole operation would take no more than a month … All these plans were aborted when Stalin learned from [Beria] that the Americans had the atom bomb and were putting it into mass production.’

The Cossacks were notorious for the atrocities they had committed. Even Goebbels had been shaken by the reports he had received of their activities in Yugoslavia and northern Italy. But they also had women and children with them, as well as some White Russians who had been living in the west since the Bolshevik victory in 1921.

The German collapse had triggered the worst round of massacres by Tito’s partisans in the civil war. In 2009, the Slovene Hidden Graves Commission identified over 600 mass graves and has estimated that they contain the bodies of more than 100,000 victims.

Smedley, Theodore White and other influential American writers could not accept for a moment that Mao might turn out to be a far worse tyrant than Chiang Kai-shek. The personality cult, the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than in the whole of the Second World War, the cruel madness of the Cultural Revolution and the seventy million victims of a regime that was in many ways worse than Stalinism proved totally beyond their imagination.

the ‘widespread practice of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers in the Asia-Pacific war was something more than merely random incidents perpetrated by individuals or small groups subject to extreme conditions. The testimonies indicate that cannibalism was a systematic and organized military strategy.’ The practice of treating prisoners as ‘human cattle’ had not come about from a collapse of discipline. It was usually directed by officers. Apart from local people, victims of cannibalism included Papuan soldiers, Australians, Americans and Indian prisoners of war who had refused to join the Indian National Army. At the end of the war, their Japanese captors had kept the Indians alive so that they could butcher them to eat one at a time. Even the inhumanity of the Nazis’ Hunger Plan in the east never descended to such levels.

The Second World War, with its global ramifications, was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The statistics of the dead – whether sixty or seventy million – are far beyond our comprehension. The sheer size of the numbers is dangerously numbing, as Vasily Grossman instinctively understood. In his view, the duty of survivors was to try to recognize the millions of ghosts from the mass graves as individuals, not as nameless people in caricatured categories, because that sort of dehumanization was precisely what the perpetrators had sought to achieve.