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Chapter 31 |
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Dramatic changes occurred in the period covered by this chapter. Having suffered defeat in World War I, Germany first sought equality with the other major powers and then overturned the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler managed to expand Germany without fighting, until he precipitated World War II by invading Poland. Then his crucial weakness emerged. He lacked a good sense of limits. Disregarding the disastrous experiences of two previous invaders of Russia (Charles XII of Sweden and Napoleon), Hitler proceeded to squander most of his military resources on his eastern front. Germany went on to complete defeat, which resulted not only in territorial losses but also in a partition of the country that lasted until October 1990.
The Soviet Union, which was not even present at the Munich Conference of major powers in 1938, emerged during the war with enough military power to control eastern Europe and to pose a serious threat to its neighbors to the west. The United States, meanwhile, emerged from its interwar isolationism as the leading power in the West, a role that continued in the postwar years.
In the Far East, Japan's attempt to establish a vast empire by military force achieved initial success but eventually failed. Just as Germany's invasion of Russia in 1941 led to overextension, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated war on a scale that Japan could not handle. One result was that Japan turned away from militarism and concentrated on developing economic power in the postwar years. (That led to a different and far more successful form of Japanese domination).
The cost of the Allies' victory was very high, and the defeated powers suffered even more. The Holocaust added millions to the horrible death toll of the war years. Moreover, the terrifying implications of modern technology reached a qualitatively new level. This was dramatically symbolized by the advent of the atomic bomb, but even so-called conventional weapons reached a level of destructiveness that made the cost of war between major powers seem unacceptably high to any rational observer. Air raids on Dresden and Tokyo resulted in higher death tolls than did the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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