The Heart Of World War II

Post date: Sep 02, 2010 9:56:8 AM

World War II continues to capture the imagination like no

other conflict in history.  A large part of this may well be

because it is the most recent traditional war - as popularly

imagined.  While any number of large-scale conflicts have

arisen since then, none have been "traditional" as World War

II has been.  Most wars are between generally unequal powers.

 After all, no one bothers fighting unless they think they

can win - or are forced to.

However, in World War II, though it started out as the usual

big-power-attacks-small-power conflict, big powers - the

United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union - soon

joined in and the conflict expanded worldwide almost

overnight. Thus World War II was the kind of war we all know

and even "love" - a "set-piece" conflict with a real good

versus evil theme.

For most wars are over trifling matters; a hill here, a

river there.  World War II was literally a cultural war,

where not only territory was at stake but the very nature of

civilization itself, the form it would take for the next

several decades or, even, as envisioned by Adolf Hitler,

centuries. WWII's case involved the most amount of nations

which had 2 military operating alliances, the Allies and the

Axis, which began at the beginning of September 1939 with an

unseen invasion by Poland.

This was the most widespread battle throughout history, with

over 100 million personnel mobilized. It was the only war

which contributed global saturation by use of deadly nuclear

weapons that have also changed the face of this earth. Not to

mention the brutal actions against civilians known as the

Holocaust. It has the highest number of fatalities of over

50-75 million casualties. This battle was mostly for power

rather than the unconditional relief of another. The United

Nations was then instructed and practically developed for

the sake of international cooperation to prevent another

war. But as the superpowers emerged as rivals, cooperation

soon transformed into "The Cold War", which was later

resumed by U.S.A. and the USSR for the next 46 years.

It was a war to determine the way of life that should exist

in Europe, and by extension as the world's center of

geopolitical gravity at the time, the whole planet. Another

factor accounting for the enduring appeal of World War II is

the personalities of its leading antagonists.  Although

Japan(Hirohito) and China(Chiang Kai-Shek) were already at

war since the beginning of 1937, the support which lost the

naval battle against the US, Franklin D. Roosevelt,

reluctantly made the invasion on Home Islands imminent and

had also lost their chance to expand towards East Asia.

Adolf lost as well just about the same time the Japanese

naval battle was lost, except Berlin was to encounter the

final attack by Joseph Stalin and the Soviets. The Soviets

then took over Berlin which consequently sent an

unconditional surrender letter by the SS Germans in May

1945, which was also the conclusion of the life-long battle

of World War II. As soon as this was settled, the

aforementioned superpowers were at their own war with

weapons ready to fire at one another. The European colonies

recovered economically as well as the decolonization of Asia

and Africa. The battles were bloody and fatal, the weapons

showed no mercy, but the outcome was the greatest feeling to

have ever attained by the allies, victory lead towards a new

beginning.

There was Winston Churchill, an imperialist leading the

charge against Hitler in the name of "freedom;" there was

Roosevelt, a blue-blood with especially democratic beliefs

allied with the imperialist Churchill and a totalitarian

dictator no better than Hitler, Josef Stalin of the Soviet

Union, whose own anti-Semitic views and actions were simply

overlooked.  Then there was the gangster-king Chiang

Kai-Shek in China and his equally brutal nemesis Mao Tse