World War II Isn’t What You Think
On the last day of school last month, my 9th graders did a survey reflecting on their school year.
Who was one new friend they made from the dreaded other middle school upon starting at our two-town high school?
Did they prefer this year’s half masked, fully in-person nightmare, or last year’s fully masked, half in-person nightmare?
What were their favorite and least favorite topics we learned about in 9th-grade World History?
The results of the third question surprised me. In every single one of my 9th-grade classes, the most common favorite topic was…World War II. In every single one of my 9th-grade classes, the most common least favorite topic was …World War II.
I was surprised that so many students disliked World War II, but one student’s comments were incisive. “It’s not that it’s not interesting,” she said, “it’s just that it feels like we learn it all the time.” She has a point. In high school, between English classes and history classes, students learn about World War II at least three or four different times. In television, movies, and books, it feels like World War II is ubiquitous. Even modern events, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are forever analyzed in comparison to World War II. Our culture is obsessed with World War II.
Still, that many students might list World War II as their favorite didn’t surprise me. As one girl put it in our discussion, “I just love the Holocaust. Not like, love it, like that. But you know what I mean.”
As it happens, I do know what she means. The Holocaust and World War II are recent enough and present enough in pop culture and our national memory that they’re simply more relatable and accessible to a 14-year-old than, say, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Furthermore, the events are so dramatic (and so horrific) that they’re simply more gripping than, say, the gradual change and dingy gloom of the Industrial Revolution.
But I think my student’s affinity for (learning about) the Holocaust and World War II highlights a problem with our culture’s obsession with World War II: it’s simply…too simple. Not the real story of World War II, that is, but the story we tend to tell ourselves, read in books, and see in movies. In this story, World War II is a cinematic clash of good (the Americans and British fighting for freedom and human rights) versus evil (Hitler, dictatorship, and the Holocaust).
As bright as this narrative seems, it has a dark side. There’s no easy way to say this, but, well, it’s largely false. We, if we consider America and Britain to be “us,” do have the obvious claim to the moral high ground in the story, but we weren’t Hitler’s main vainquishers, nor was our moral high ground unequivocal, nor did we exactly succeed in preventing the Holocaust. Many of us believe passionately in World War II’s lesson of standing up for good against evil, to be sure; but the simplicity of our typical narrative abdicates the historian’s central job: telling the truth. The truth is that even World War II is only unambiguous in rose-colored hindsight. The Nazis were, unquestionably, evil. But the rest of the story? It’s not as simple or attractive as we think. It’s harder to wrestle with. But it’s true.
A caveat
Now, if you’re irritated reading this seeming takedown of America’s World War II pride, let me assure you that I, too, “love” World War II as an historical topic. I find it endlessly fascinating, absolutely essential to teach to our students, and definitely worth a great deal of national pride. Both books I’m reading right now are about World War II (Eight Days in May by Volker Ullrich and Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder), and I swell with emotion every time I watch the first episode of Band of Brothers, when the American soldiers board their planes to embark on the D-Day invasion. The Allies did, after all, risk (and in millions of cases, sacrifice) their lives to defeat the Axis regimes. Moreover, the Allies are only one part of the staggering human cost of the war. 70 million people died serving, combating, or merely existing near Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and the Japanese Empire. Tens of millions more suffered physical wounds, rape, homelessness, and enslavement. The toll is incomprehensible.
Furthermore, in addition to its emotional weight and human cost, World War II was the most consequential event in the twentieth century. The war is sometimes incorrectly perceived as merely a terrible blip. According to this line of thinking, Enlightenment ideals like democracy and human rights were already rising to dominance in the west by the early 1900s, and their ascent simply resumed after the brief detour of World War II. This is false. The Allied victory in World War II was the central cause of the triumph of democracy in the West in the twentieth century. The recognition of Nazi evils rendered formerly popular concepts of authoritarianism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, and imperialism unfashionable (although not extinct).
Nevertheless, despite World War II’s tremendous historical importance and deserved patriotic legacy, our cinematic good vs. evil narrative is a severe oversimplification. First of all, while the Americans and the British may rightfully claim the war’s moral high ground, they were not the protagonists they imagine themselves to have been. World War II was a global conflict more than any other in history, but its main stage was the eastern European front, and its main victor was the Soviet Union.
Protagonists
Death toll may be a blunt measure of war, but its significance is undeniable in this case. Accounting for all participating countries, the western European front of World War II likely inflicted a military death toll of around one million soldiers. The eastern front, in contrast, killed as many as fifteen million soldiers. The civilian death toll, too, illustrates the drastic discrepancy. While less than two million civilians died on the western front, likely more than twenty million civilians died on the eastern front. These numbers are not exactly comparable, because so many of the millions dead on the eastern front were casualties of deliberate German or Soviet murder, rather than collateral combat damage, but this too indicates the more all-consuming nature of the war in the east. Finally, while the Americans and British combined for about one million (largely military) lives lost in the global fight against the Axis Powers, this pales in comparison to the Soviet Union’s ten million military deaths and seventeen million civilian deaths. True, a large minority of the Soviet civilian casualties were victims of Stalin, not Hitler. Still, the fact remains: World War II was, at its core, a war between Germany and the Soviet Union (and secondarily, for that matter, a war between Japan and the rest of Asia).
The war’s timeline as well as its death toll reveals the American and British role to be secondary. As in Band of Brothers (my apologies for the repeated references, but it’s the best television show of all time), we typically imagine Hitler’s downfall to begin with the D-Day invasion. We acknowledge the Soviet Union’s presence by highlighting the hopelessness of Hitler’s two-front war made necessary by the D-Day invasion, but we focus on D-Day and the western front as the core of Hitler’s defeat. The D-Day invasion, though, launched on June 6, 1944, two and a half years after the Soviet Union had halted the German invasion at the Battle of Moscow, and a year and a half after the Soviet Union had effectively sealed Germany’s ultimate defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. By June of 1944, the Soviet Union was already on the steady march towards victory in Germany, slowly forcing a German retreat from western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. By the time the first British and American paratroopers set foot on European soil in the wee hours of June 6, 1944, Hitler’s fate was already certain. Furthermore, when Hitler himself realized this upon the sound of gunshots ringing through the streets of Berlin in late April, 1945, the gunshots didn’t belong to the Americans or the British — they belonged to the two million Soviet soldiers assaulting Germany’s capital.
Of course, the Americans and British (and other important Allies, like Canada, Australia, and India) did play major roles in World War II. Their death toll, including four hundred thousand dead Americans, was still colossal. Their opening of the western European front was pivotal. They also contributed in many ways that can’t be measured by a battle timeline or a death toll, as my students will tell you during our “Which country was the MVP of the Allied Powers?” debate. For a time early in the war, when Hitler was still allied with Stalin, the British inspired future resistance by standing essentially alone against Hitler, even surviving a daily onslaught from the air during the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz. Moreover, for years before any American soldiers set foot in Europe, the United States provided enormous amounts of supplies and weapons to Britain and the Soviet Union.
Still, the American and British roles in World War II simply cannot compare to that of the Soviet Union. A common American tourist quip is that the French shouldn’t complain about us speaking English rather than French when we visit. Instead, they should be thanking us for the fact that they still speak French at all. Without our victory in World War II, you see, they’d be speaking German. Ha! This reflects a common misunderstanding of the American and British invasion of Europe in 1944 and 1945. We accelerated the outcome of the war, but we did not determine it. If we were preventing the spread of any imperial dominion, it wasn’t that of Hitler’s Germany, but that of Stalin’s Soviet Union (our ally). We didn’t save the French or western Europeans from speaking German, the Soviet Union did. If we made any such linguistic rescue, it was to save western Europe from speaking Russian. Such was the Soviet Union’s centrality to World War II.
Soviet atrocities
The Soviet Union’s immense role in World War II hints at another hole in our happy narrative. While there was, of course, an attractive “good vs. evil” element to our fight against the Axis Powers, it was not without nuance. We can’t exactly consider the Allied Powers to be the unequivocal “good guys” when the most important ally, the Soviet Union, undertook the displacement and murder of civilians in much the same way as Nazi Germany.
In fact, in the years before the war, Soviet abuse of civilians dwarfed Nazi abuse of civilians. Stalin was already responsible for millions of civilian deaths before the war began, including hundreds of thousands of property-owning peasants, or kulaks, killed as “class enemies” in 1930–31, at least five million Ukrainians starved in a state-directed famine in 1932–33, and around a million “political opponents” executed in the Great Purge of 1937–38.
Soviet crimes continued to rage during the war, as they murdered hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities, particularly in Poland, Ukraine, and the newly conquered Baltic states in 1939–41. In one notable example, the Katyn massacre of 1940, the Soviet NKVD, or secret police, attempted to decapitate Polish society by murdering twenty-two thousand Polish intellectuals and leaders. Led to believe they were being released from their prison camp, these military officers, soldiers, bureaucrats, teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and others often marched away with the NKVD officers joyfully. They were shot in the back of the head, one by one.
Not included in these numbers are the tens of millions more kulaks, political opponents, and ethnic minorities whom the Soviet Union deported to forced settlements and Gulag labor camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. An unknowable many of these deportees died due to the journey, were killed, or never returned home.
In time, to be sure, Axis crimes surpassed Soviet crimes. Japan perpetrated its own atrocities in Asia, including the brutally sadistic murder of at least two hundred thousand Chinese civilians in the Nanjing massacre of December–January, 1937, and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women across Japanese-occupied territory. But it was Nazi Germany that committed such crimes on the largest scale. German Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads, murdered millions of Jews and other eastern Europeans in indiscriminate mass shootings. German soldiers raped as many as ten million women in their invasion of the Soviet Union. The German military killed over 3 million (mostly Soviet) prisoners of war. Most chillingly, the Germans’ Holocaust death camps in Poland employed railroads, gas chambers, and crematoria to make murder into an industrial factory system. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to broadly paint the Allied cause in the war as the noble one when the main ally who defeated Hitler and the Nazis was busy perpetrating many of the same sorts of atrocities. Particularly on the main stage of World War II, the eastern European front, World War II was not a clash of good vs. evil, but a clash of evil vs. evil.
American and British atrocities
On the side stage of World War II, Europe’s western front, the “good vs. evil” story is certainly much more applicable. Compared to their enemies, Germany and Japan, and their ally, the Soviet Union, the Americans and the British must be aptly labeled the “good guys.” In invading Hitler’s empire and in minimizing the westward spread of Stalinist communism, the Americans and British were, in fact, fighting for the worthwhile ideals of freedom and democracy. Moreover, it goes without saying that the Americans and British did not commit atrocities on the scale of the Germans, Japanese, or Soviets. However, just as it would be dishonest and unfair to equate the Americans and British to the Soviet Union or the Axis regimes, it would also be misleading to pretend the Americans and British were entirely innocent of wartime atrocities.
A relatively well-known stain on the American moral high ground was the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. Over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans were arrested due only to their ethnicity and placed in concentration camps across the western United States. According to a 1942 poll, over 90% of Americans supported this internment of their fellow citizens. Still, while this stain is relatively well known, its distinct lack of murder also makes it relatively minor in comparison to Axis and Soviet atrocities.
More fitting of the “atrocity” term were the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan during the denouement of the war. A quite valid argument posits that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an overall “good,” promptly ending the war while killing hundreds of thousands fewer people (including fewer Japanese) than an invasion would have. Nonetheless, stories of children with their skin dripping off their bodies are hard to stomach, as is the civilian death toll of over one hundred thousand.
Even more deadly, but less well known, than either atomic bombing was the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo. In one night, American bombs and their subsequent (intended) firestorms killed one hundred thousand Japanese civilians, and made over a million more homeless. In other words, more Japanese civilians died in these three discrete bombing incidents than American soldiers died in the entire Pacific war from 1941 to 1945. While one can argue that these sorts of attacks are just “part of war,” it seems clear that we’d view these incidents as atrocities if they had been perpetrated by Germans or Japanese against British or American civilians.
Moreover, while one can argue that such vicious attacks on Japan were necessary to force their surrender, that argument fails when considering the bombings of German cities in 1945, when the outcome of the war was beyond doubt. When on the night of February 13, 1945, British and American aircraft rained bombs on the German city of Dresden, razing 90% of its city center and killing more than twenty thousand civilians, the goal seemed to be vengeance and terror as much as military utility.
The largest scale Anglo-American atrocity is the least known: the Great Bengal Famine in Britain’s India colony. As the war interrupted supply chains around the world, and the main belligerent powers insisted on keeping sufficient food stores for their militaries, other regions’ food needs went unmet. In northeast India (including modern India and Bangladesh), climate issues and poor harvests compounded the war’s supply chain problems. Despite plentiful reporting to Churchill’s War Cabinet on the rising famine in Bengal, Britain refused to send food relief to its Indian subjects until 1944. At least two million Indians died of starvation. Once again, while one might argue that this was just “part of war,” or an unfortunate accident of natural food scarcity, I know how quickly we Irish Americans condemn the British for similar actions in the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.
The Americans and British were absolutely not committing crimes like the Germans, Japanese, or Soviets. Neither, however, were the Americans and British the perfect heroes as often depicted in shows and movies. American and British behavior is separated by a chasm from German, Japanese, and Soviet behavior; but if we identify the Americans and British as “us” in the story, we must acknowledge the uncomfortable parts too.
The Holocaust
For my student who said World War II was her favorite unit, it was the Holocaust she highlighted as the main event. Indeed, perhaps the central tenet of World War II’s “good vs. evil” narrative is the Allies’ role in putting a halt to the Holocaust. By applying the industrial factory system to the project of ethnoreligious extermination, Hitler’s Holocaust seems to exceed any other barbarity in the world’s history. As the story goes, though, the Allies sacrificed their lives to stop this Holocaust. Like the American Civil War to end slavery, this makes World War II a war with a deeply righteous cause. On this theme, Band of Brothers (sorry) includes a magnificent episode in which the disenchanted American soldiers find a concentration camp full of emaciated and abused Jews, and finally realize the moral purpose for which they’ve been fighting.
Unfortunately, while the common Allied soldier may genuinely have felt this way, and while hundreds of thousands more Jews and others would have been killed if the Allies hadn’t arrived when they did, the Allies as a whole cannot claim much credit for stopping the Holocaust. First of all, stopping the Holocaust was not a goal of the Allied Powers. Though the Polish resistance reported German mass killings to the Allied command relatively early in the war, the Allied command offered the Polish resistance no serious support. Even when the Poles reported the gassing of Jews at the Treblinka death camp in 1942, the Allies refused to even bomb the train tracks leading to the camps. While German crimes in the Holocaust were so incomprehensible that the Allies may not have truly understood their extent, neither were the Allies clueless about the mass murder on the eastern front. Their delay in addressing that murder was not a delay of ignorance, but a delay of choice.
The cost of this delay is even larger than most realize. While many of us have heard the total Holocaust death tolls — six million Jews and five million others — many of us may overestimate the number of people who were saved by the Allied advances in 1944–45.
Of Germany and Austria’s 400,000 Jews, Hungary’s 500,000 Jews, and Czechoslovakia’s 350,000 Jews, more than half were already dead. Over 80% of Latvia and Lithuania’s 250,000 Jews were already dead. Over 80%, too, of Yugoslavia’s 80,000 Jews were dead.
In Poland, previously the heart of European Judaism, only 0.3 million out of 3.3 million Jews survived the war. Over 90% of Europe’s largest national Jewish community had been murdered.
Notwithstanding inspiring success stories, like the Danish resistance smuggling 99% of its 7,500 Jews to safety in Sweden, Hitler’s Holocaust was nearer to completion than we tend to imagine. The Allied victory did, in fact, save hundreds of thousands of Jews from Nazi murder. For that, we should commemorate Allied efforts. Nevertheless, it remains true that stopping the Holocaust was not a goal of the Allied Powers. When they learned about Nazi mass murder early in the war, they did nothing; and when they finally liberated Europe from the Nazis in 1944 and 1945, it was far too late for far too many victims. More than half of all the Jews of Europe were already dead.
Conclusion
While these revelations will come as no surprise to historians, teachers, and buffs, they may come as a surprise, or even an offense, to others. My intention is to surprise, but not offend. The historian’s most fundamental job is to tell the truth. As much as I’d prefer our typical good vs. evil tale of World War II to be true, it simply…isn’t.
Even worse, our incessant focus on World War II and the Holocaust is lazy. Our comfortable and heartwarming narrative is altogether cleansed of nuance, which makes it an easy, uncontroversial story to tell. This sanitized narrative is great at cultivating unity and patriotism, because even Americans divided by a chasm of partisan polarization can agree on smashing the Nazis. However, our usual story does us all (not least our students) a disservice by implying that evil is always obvious, and the good guys are always perfect.
These expectations are not calibrated to reality. They leave us to vacillate in the face of modern evil as we save our energy for the next Hitler. They leave us to castigate historical and modern leaders for their imperfections, as we wait in vain for the next flawless hero.
One of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard was from a Holocaust survivor who visited the school where I work around 2014. I sadly can’t remember the man’s name, nor can I remember the personal story he recounted, but I’ll never forget the last thing he said. One of the teachers hosting the event, hoping to neatly conclude with a heartwarming lesson before the bell rang, called off the remaining raised hands and posed one final softball question: “How do we, and especially these students growing up today, stop something like this from ever happening again?”
The man answered without even pausing to think.
“You won’t.”
The lack of nuance in our historical memory is a main reason he may be right. By the time evil becomes as conspicuous as it appears in hindsight, it’s often too late. When the first gas chamber was built at Auschwitz, Hitler had already been in power for virtually a decade, laying the ideological and institutional foundation for the horrors to come.
Ultimately, I think the lessons are these: Evil isn’t always as conspicuous or monopolized as we imagine in hindsight, but this ambiguity doesn’t mean it’s not evil. Similarly, the “good guys” aren’t always as unequivocally good as we imagine in hindsight, but these imperfections don’t mean they’re not the good guys.
To recount the nuanced reality of World War II is not to cheapen the legacies of America and Britain, but to validate them. True, the Americans and the British were imperfect powers fighting on a relative side stage of World War II. Nevertheless, they (and many of their global Allies) were the all-too-rare “good guys” in an otherwise despicable and heinous war, as they risked and sacrificed their lives in faraway lands to liberate foreign peoples from Axis rule.
In the film 500 Days of Summer, one character describes his girlfriend, essentially saying, “She’s not the girl of my dreams. But she’s better than the girl of my dreams. She’s real.” World War II may not have been the World War II of our dreams. But we are not propagandists, spinning the most inspiring narrative; we are historians, beholden to the truth. The truth is always better. After all, it’s real.
