The legacy of the Second World War shaped the world we live in today. It caused human suffering and physical destruction on an unprecedented scale.
An estimated 60 million people lost their lives. Many towns and cities in parts of Europe and East Asia were all but wiped out, and millions of people were displaced, made homeless and hugely affected by all they had been through. As well as these more urgent problems, there were longer-term impacts of the ‘total war’ that had been waged across the world.
Kate Clements, one of the curators of the Second World War Galleries at IWM London, reflects on how these impacts were felt for decades after the war ended.
Immediate Aftermath
After the war ended, the victorious Allied powers – led by Britain, the US and the Soviet Union – were left with the huge task of looking after not only their own war-weary populations but also those of the defeated nations, Germany and Japan. Widespread violence and modern weapons had wrought huge destruction, caused mass displacement and homelessness and heavily damaged infrastructure, communications and whole economies. Millions of people, including refugees, displaced civilians, combat personnel and prisoners of war, needed to be fed, cared for and housed or returned home. Shortages, hunger and inflation were widespread, and, in the absence of law and order, crime rates rose as desperate people resorted to theft and looting.
Allied occupation regimes took control of Germany and Japan and struggled to meet their populations’ material needs whilst also seeking to demilitarise and ‘re-educate’ both countries. Linked to this, the Allied powers convened international military tribunals and held ground-breaking trials that prosecuted and punished military and civilian leaders of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
There were further humanitarian issues, including the millions of children made orphans by the war as well as the rise of infectious diseases, which spread quickly through places unable to cope with them due to the breakdown in infrastructure and sanitation. Devastation from bombing was such that in Tokyo, some of the thousands of homeless people even lived in converted buses and, in Berlin, people could sunbathe in their bomb-hit homes, while ‘rubble women’ (Trümmerfrauen) cleared up the damage. In Singapore and Hong Kong, Japanese prisoners of war were put to work to clear the debris. Slowly but surely, reconstruction began and countries got back to work again.
Much of the war’s most extreme violence was motivated by racism and ultra-nationalism and, in some places, this spilled over into its aftermath. In Europe, thousands died in the fight over ethnic nationalism between Ukraine and Poland, and Germany was despised by many for having started the war. German-speaking people were driven from their homes and even, in some instances, killed. Around 12 million ‘ethnic Germans’ were expelled from eastern Europe into an already overcrowded Germany. Post-war revenge also took the form of punishment – both officially sanctioned and outside of the law – of wartime collaborators, traitors and political enemies.
Many of these events of the immediate post-war years had lasting repercussions. Large rebuilding programmes changed the face of many cities and towns in Europe and Asia. The international trials of war criminals set a precedence and coined new legal terms, ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. In addition the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan shaped both their future governance and their places within Europe and Asia respectively.
Long-term legacy
The all-encompassing nature of the total war that engulfed the world from the late 1930s until 1945 ensured that it had a lasting impact on the decades that followed. It gave rise to new ideas, movements, divisions and conflicts that cast long shadows over people’s lives.
For many of those who had fought in the war, it left physical and psychological scars. The impact of the conflict on mental health was impossible to measure, and many people were haunted by the widespread violence they had witnessed, suffered from, or carried out. Millions of people were wounded, both combatants and civilians. In Britain, Dr Ludgwig Guttman introduced pioneering treatments for those affected by spinal injuries, including sports therapy. He organised the first Stoke Mandeville Games for disabled people in 1948, which later became the international Paralympic Games.
It was hard for many former combatants to adjust to civilian life in a changed world. Returning soldiers were strangers to children they had hardly seen, and the divorce rate soared in Europe as couples who had been through separate experiences struggled to cope. Whilst many ex-servicemen received a hero’s welcome, those who had been captured or fought for the defeated nations usually did not.
New international organisations emerged in the wake of the war’s large-scale human suffering and physical destruction. These aimed to keep the peace, foster greater global co-operation, and support better financial stability, and included the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The United Nations (UN) was created while the war was still being fought, stating that it was ‘determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’. But it was soon beset by internal disagreements and was unable to preserve the peace and deter more conflicts.
In Britain, fundamental shifts in people’s attitudes and expectations that occurred during, and because of, the war resulted in significant post-war changes to its society and its politics. In July 1945, the Labour Party won the General Election by a landslide and soon delivered on its campaign promises for better schooling, a universal benefits system and a free National Health Service. Many of these welfare reforms were based on the 1942 Beveridge Report into improving British people’s lives. It was a shock defeat for Britain’s staunch wartime leader, Winston Churchill, but he had not kept pace with the public mood.
There were also changes to Britain’s global standing. Along with other European colonial powers whose prestige had been damaged by wartime enemy occupation of their overseas territories, Britain began to lose control of parts of its empire. In the decades after the war, people across the British Empire who had fought and worked for Britain claimed their independence. The French and Dutch, too, eventually had to give up control of their colonies in Indochina and the East Indies. Anti-British uprisings undermined British rule in places such as Palestine and Malaya (now Malaysia). The most significant change happened in India, where, after decades of campaigning, the Indian people gained self-rule. The vast country was also divided along religious lines into India and Pakistan (today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan). This caused chaos, confusion and the deaths of up to 2 million people from ethnic violence and disease as around 14 million people were displaced following the announcement of the new border.
The collapse of Japanese rule in East Asia left the region unsettled. Some countries, for example the Philippines, gained independence, while colonial rule was restored in others, such as Singapore. Japanese occupation had exposed divisions which resulted in violence and political unrest in the years that followed. China was torn apart by a civil war that restarted following Japan’s defeat. After years of suffering in their war with Japan, millions more Chinese people were killed or displaced in the continued fighting. Eventually, the communist People’s Republic of China was formed in 1949 under a new leader, Mao Zedong. Communism also gained ground in other parts of Asia. Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France in northern Vietnam, while French rule continued in the south. The struggle for control in Vietnam continued for decades afterwards. Korea, now free of Japanese rule, was divided and in 1950, the two halves went to war. North Korea soon fell under communist influence.
Communism also took an increasing hold in eastern Europe in the post-war era. As the Red Army surged towards Berlin, clearing territories of German occupying forces, Moscow took advantage of the power vacuum and seized control in multiple countries. Hundreds of thousands of people fought against this onslaught, forming armed resistance movements in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere. Many left their homes and lived in hiding, often in forests. Despite their brave defiance, they were eventually crushed by the all-powerful Soviet Union.
Soon, in Churchill’s words, ‘an iron curtain…descended across the continent’ as a new, mostly political, war emerged in the wake of the Second World War. It came to be known as the Cold War. No longer unified by fighting a common enemy, the innate differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were all too evident. Before long, these two politically opposed superpowers led the world into an age of ‘East’ versus ‘West’ that was marked by increasing nuclear rivalry. After learning of America’s atomic programme, Stalin demanded the Soviet Union develop its own atomic weaponry. On 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon. Soon learning of this, the US began work on a more destructive, hydrogen ‘superbomb’. In the decades that followed, the rival superpowers brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in their race for supremacy. As they entered into the ‘atomic age’, people across the world soon lived in fear of nuclear apocalypse.
