10 Aug 1945 Jahr - Japan surrenders, ending war in Asia

Beschreibung:

After the battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest and bloodiest of the Pacific war, a Marine Corps rabbi chaplain delivered the eulogy for the fallen. “This shall not be in vain,” he said, surveying a battlefield that witnessed the deaths of nearly 30,000 American and Japanese soldiers. Speaking of American losses, he said, “from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come — we promise — the birth of a new freedom for the sons of man everywhere.” The toll of “suffering and sorrow” from World War II was enormous. Worldwide, more than 50 million soldiers and civilians were killed, nearly 2.5 percent of the globe’s population. The Holocaust took the lives of 6 million European Jews, 2.6 million from Poland alone. Nearly 100 million additional people were wounded, and 30 million people across the globe were rendered homeless. It was the most wrenching, disruptive, and terrible war in modern history.

Alongside the human toll was profound physical, economic, and political destruction. Hundreds of cities in Europe and Asia had been bombed into rubble. Some of them, such as Dresden, Warsaw, Hamburg, and Hiroshima, were simply obliterated. Much of the industrial infrastructure of Germany and Japan, two of the world’s most important economies before the war, was shattered. Despite being one of the victors, Britain was no longer a global power. The independence movement in India was only the most obvious sign of Britain’s weakening imperial reach. In the colonized world in Asia and Africa, many had taken the Atlantic Charter, and FDR’s insistence that this was a war for democracy, seriously. For them, the continuation of European imperialism was unacceptable.

Even though the United States was safe from bombings and battles, the war left a great impact on the nation. More than 400,000 lives were lost, and nearly 300,000 American soldiers were wounded. In total, 16 million Americans served in the wartime military, a commitment of military service equaled in U.S. history only during the Civil War. The return of those millions of GIs to civilian life would remake American society. In 1950, World War II veterans made up one-third of all American men over the age of nineteen, and through the GI Bill they gained education and access to a middle class. Wartime spending had ended the Great Depression and given a great boost to American industry, and to the economy as a whole, that would endure for several decades. And the war indisputably left the United States a stronger, perhaps even the dominant, world power.

After incalculable costs, and the use of a new and terrible weapon, the Axis powers had finally been defeated by a fragile alliance of the capitalist West and the communist Soviet Union. The challenges of building a new international order would strain and then destroy the victorious coalition. The final chapter of European empire would see fights for independence around the globe. Even as millions celebrated a long-awaited peace, the far longer Cold War, which would pit the capitalist West against the communist East, was brewing.

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