Dr. Jerry Sanson
Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum
As we begin the month of August that commemorates the 80th anniversary of the physical end of World War II, (the official Japanese surrender ceremony did not occur until September 2) it is worth thinking back about how enormous that conflict was and the cost in human lives that it demanded. Remembering the entire scope of the war can lead readers to concur with Tom Brokaw’s characterization of people who lived through the Great Depression and then experienced that awful conflict as the Greatest Generation.
Historians trace the deep roots of World War II to Japanese aggression toward its neighbors, especially China, during the early 1930s, but popular consciousness often dates the beginning of the war to Germany’s surprise invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, that sparked 2,194 days, or six years and one day, of war. Mars claimed an estimated 70 to 85 million victims during this conflict counting military and civilian lives lost, making it the deadliest war in human history.
German chancellor Adolf Hitler followed the dawn invasion of Poland with “blitzkrieg” or “Lightning War” that quickly overran the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and pushed about 300,000 British and Allied troops off the European Continent at Dunkirk, France. Success in the West led a confident Hitler to order German troops to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, a campaign that finally led German troops to the gates of Moscow and to the fierce Battle of Stalingrad from July 1942 until February 1943 that cost almost two million casualties in a deadly siege before Soviet troops turned the tide.
Western Allies invaded Sicily and southern Italy, causing the fall of Benito Mussolini’s Nazi-allied Fascist government during July 1943, before slowly fighting their way up the Italian Peninsula against determined German opposition that cost blood for every foot northward they plodded. The Allies staged the greatest amphibious invasion in history on D-Day, June 6, 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, France, thus opening a Western Front of the war. Allied troops liberated Paris from Nazi control on August 25 and Brussels less than two weeks later. Allied and German casualty estimates for June 6 until August 30 when German forces retreated across the Seine River and evacuated France numbered about 425,000.
Germany could not fight the two-front war that it now faced but found reserve strength to stage one last desperate battle to split Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg, December 1944-January 1945. The Battle of the Bulge cost about 20,000 mostly American casualties, but Allied lines held. The Soviet Union staged a Winter Campaign on the Eastern Front that placed additional drain on Nazi forces.
Firebombing of Dresden and other German cities led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths, armies of the Western Allies crossed the Rhine River into Germany, and Soviet forces continued to fight their way across Germany from the East.
Allied troops discovered the horror that the Nazis inflicted in their concentration camps as they crossed territory formerly under Nazi control. Whether they were classified as work camps or death camps often did not matter to those held there. They were either worked to death or were killed as part of the Nazi plan to eliminate entire groups within the European population. Estimates of their numbers total about six million.
Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, as his Thousand Year Reich collapsed around him. His successor, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, authorized General Alfred Jodl to sign an unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. The Soviet government demanded a separate surrender, and Jodl signed it the next day. Donitz later received a sentence of ten years imprisonment and Jodl received a sentence of death by hanging at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal.
Meanwhile, Japan was busy expanding its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in the Pacific, heavily damaging American forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, and building an empire across the Pacific until taking on the United States Navy at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 that turned the tide in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
The Allied strategy of “Island Hopping” across the Pacific led to the decisive battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the winter and spring of 1945. The price paid by the Allies for these victories numbered about 26,000 casualties on Iwo Jima and about 50,000 casualties on Okinawa, the bloodiest and fiercest battle in the Pacific Theater.
After the lessons learned from the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Allied commanders concluded that the initial invasion of the Japanese home islands would cost an estimated one million Allied casualties. President Harry Truman decided to abandon plans for a traditional invasion and resort to using new American atomic weapons after giving Japanese government ministers the option of surrender rather than face this new technology of destruction.
The first atomic bomb used in warfare dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, resulting in about 70,000 causalities instantly and tens of thousands of others later from radiation poisoning or wounds incurred in the blast.
Japan faced additional pressure when the Soviet Union declared war on August 8 and even more when the US used another atomic weapon on the city of Nagasaki on August 9 that caused an estimated 39,000-70,000 immediate deaths and thousands more caused by radiation sickness and injuries from the blast. The Japanese cabinet was deadlocked on the subject of surrender even after these unprecedented attacks until Emperor Hirohito announced on August 15 his decision that Japan would surrender.
American General Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay along with more than 250 additional Allied warships on September 2, 1945. MacArthur announced to the world that “Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”
