Transcription
Okay, it's time to talk about how World War II was fought. So, if you're ready to get those brain cows milked totalitarian style, let's get to it.
Now, remember when we talked about World War I? I mentioned that it was what we call a total war, which is a war that requires the mobilization of a country's entire population, both military and civilian, in order to fight. Additionally, in total war, civilians are considered every bit as legitimate a target as military targets.
World War II had all the same total war DNA as the First World War, except more so, because it was bigger and more devastating in every way. Oh, and by the way, if you want to follow along with this video and all my videos, check the link in the description.
I won't rehash the causes of the war here since we did that in the last video, but here I'll just tell you that the most immediate cause of the war was Hitler's invasion of Poland. Recall that Hitler was all about getting himself and the German people some Lebensraum, which is to say living space. So, he went ahead and started conquering and annexing territory all over Europe.
Not wanting to start another world stinking war, Britain and France just kind of let it happen under the policies of appeasement. But on September 1st, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and that was enough to smack Western powers in the face and wake them up to the fact that Hitler aimed to take over the whole dang world if someone didn't stop it.
So, the war began. Like in World War I, an alliance system formed into two rival sides. The Axis powers included Germany, Italy, and Japan, who were all fascist brothers from another mother. Then there were the Allied Powers, which included Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
To be clear, the Soviets and the Americans weren't involved on the Allied side at the beginning, but they would enter later. In fact, the Soviets were somewhat allied to Germany in the beginning because they signed a non-aggression pact. But later, Hitler decided that he was tired of being non-aggressive toward the stinking Soviet communists that he hated, and so he invaded the Soviet Union.
That sent the Soviets squarely into alliance with Britain and France. The United States was just having a little isolationist me time across the Atlantic, but still providing money and munitions to Britain. But then Japan went ahead and bombed the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and that brought the Americans into the war on the side of the Allies.
Okay, so now that you know who was fighting, let's talk about what strategies those governments used to mobilize for this next iteration of total war.
Look, I'd love to tell you that we're going to consider in detail some of the main and most dramatic battles of the war, of which there were many. But here's where I tell you that for the purposes of this course, you don't really need to know any of that.
What's more important here is that you understand that, in general, there were many continuities with World War I in how governments prepared for and waged this war. Most of the changes just had to do with the scope of the war and how deadly it was.
Just like in the First World War, governments used various tactics to mobilize their own populations as well as colonial troops for the war. First up was the use of propaganda. Once again, governments used propaganda in various forms to provoke nationalism in its people and to demonize their enemies. By showing fear, they were able to assemble massive armies and keep civilians sacrificing on the home front.
Second, governments leaned heavily on various ideologies to wage this war. Let's compare three of these ideologies. First up was fascism, which, remember, is all about the glorification of the state and the use of militaristic means to accomplish that glorification.
So, as I said before, Japan, Germany, and Italy were all fascist states. Though they weren't all exactly the same flavor of fascism, in general, they handled mobilization and waging war in similar ways. You see, fascist states were organized politically and economically in order to serve the interest not of the people, but of the states.
Therefore, with its blend of extreme nationalism and the glorification of military conflict, fascist states were able to marshal their whole economies and populations quickly and efficiently in order to mobilize for war. For example, Hitler made use of all the people he conquered in his lust for Lebensraum to serve the war effort. He established labor camps all across the German Reich where Jews, slaves, and other people that Hitler deemed subhuman were forced into brutal coerced labor projects to support the war.
The second ideology we'll throw into the comparison was communism. Now, remember what we learned in a previous video about the stoic totalitarian turd, Joseph Stalin? Before the war even began, he had already organized the Soviet economy to serve his own interests, which consisted chiefly in rapid industrialization through his five-year plans.
Those, to put it mildly, led to catastrophic amounts of suffering. But when it came time to mobilize for World War II, Stalin pressed these demands of collectivization and industrialization even further, requiring munitions factories and farmers to increase their output in service of the war with brutal and unflinching demands.
Then third, let's consider how the ideology of democracy was leveraged in service of the war. By the time the war began, Great Britain had a new prime minister, namely Winston Churchill. Churchill was in no mood to act like a limp overcooked noodle like his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had, what with all the appeasement nonsense.
No, Churchill was nicknamed the Bulldog because he was in the mood to chomp down hard on Hitler's hind parts and crush the Third Reich under his golden haunches. But Great Britain was not a totalitarian state, so Churchill could not control his people and Britain's economy like a dictator.
So, when it came time to mobilize for war and keep the war effort going, Churchill had to rely more on persuasion and the cooperation of his people. To that end, propaganda campaigns dubbed it as a people's war, and the government made promises to the people to expand the welfare state in exchange for their wartime sacrifices.
Okay, now the third and final category of comparison between the First and Second World Wars was the repression of basic freedoms. This occurred in varying degrees across fascist, communist, and democratic nations.
In the United States, for example, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, a large portion of whom were American citizens, were forced into internment camps because the government feared that they were operatives for the enemy. In Germany, Jews and other undesirables were forced into ghettos as a result of the Nuremberg laws and then later into concentration camps, where they would be forced into hard labor or systematically killed.
There are so many other examples, but those two are enough for our purposes.
Okay, now finally we need to talk about the new strategies and technologies that made this the deadliest war in history. I'm going to give you two strategies and one new technology.
The first new strategy was pioneered by Germany. It was known as Blitzkrieg, which was a shock and awe strategy that aimed to eliminate the enemy with incredible speed. It basically combined air assaults from planes and quick infantry movement from tanks and other armored vehicles. Therefore, the trench warfare that characterized World War I was essentially obsolete.
The second strategy to know was called firebombing. Now, when you think of a bomb, you probably think of something like this that does a bunch of damage with a singular blast. But firebombs were small clusters of explosive devices that were meant to fall in urban areas and not do damage necessarily with a big blast, but by starting fires.
So, the Allied forces firebombed many urban areas, but none more devastating than Dresden in Germany and Tokyo in Japan. Between these two campaigns, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in massive fires that were so hot they created their own weather systems.
Finally, the most significant new technology you need to know for World War II was the invention of the atomic bomb, developed by the United States. By destabilizing particles on the atomic level, a single blast from this bomb could destroy an entire city. The US dropped two of these bombs on largely civilian areas in Japan: one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
The result was the surrender of Japan and the end of the war in the Pacific. In the end, the Allied Powers prevailed both in Europe and in the Pacific.
With the unthinkable destruction and death caused by this war, there was never an armed conflict in world history again, which is a big fat lie. But that story is going to have to wait till Unit 8.
Okay, click here to keep reviewing for Unit 7, and click here to grab my video note guides, which will help you get all the contents of this course firmly crammed into your brain folds. I'm glad we got to hang out, and I'll catch you on the flip-flop. I'm out.