# data[].attributes.headline
How England recouped in the end of the war

# data[].attributes.subject
How England recouped in the end of the war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the end of the first world war it had been possible to contemplate going back to business as usual. However, 1945 was different, so different that it has been called Year Zero. The capacity for destruction had been so much greater than in the earlier war that much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. And this time civilians had been the target as much as the military. The figures are hard to grasp: as many as 60 million dead, 25 million of them Soviet. A new word, genocide, entered the language to deal with the murder of 6 million of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.

During the war, millions more had fled their homes or been forcibly moved to work in Germany or Japan or, in the case of the Soviet Union, because Stalin feared that they might be traitors. Now, in 1945, another new word appeared, the DP, or "displaced person". There were millions of them, some voluntary refugees moving westward in the face of the advancing Red Army, others deported as undesirable minorities. The newly independent Czech state expelled nearly 3 million ethnic Germans in the years after 1945, and Poland a further 1.3 million. Everywhere there were lost or orphaned children, 300,000 alone in Yugoslavia. Thousands of unwanted babies added to the misery. It is impossible to know how many women in Europe were raped by the Red Army soldiers, who saw them as part of the spoils of war, but in Germany alone some 2 million women had abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.

The allies did what they could to feed and house the refugees and to reunite families that had been forcibly torn apart, but the scale of the task and the obstacles were enormous. The majority of ports in Europe and many in Asia had been destroyed or badly damaged; bridges had been blown up; railway locomotives and rolling stock had vanished. Great cities such as Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were piles of rubble and ash.

In Germany, it has been estimated, 70% of housing had gone and, in the Soviet Union, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages. Factories and workshops were in ruins, fields, forests and vineyards ripped to pieces. Millions of acres in north China were flooded after the Japanese destroyed the dykes. Many Europeans were surviving on less than 1,000 calories per day; in the Netherlands they were eating tulip bulbs. Apart from the United States and allies such as Canada and Australia, who were largely unscathed by the war's destruction, the European powers such as Britain and France had precious little to spare. Britain had largely bankrupted itself fighting the war and France had been stripped bare by the Germans. They were struggling to look after their own peoples and deal with reincorporating their military into civilian society. The four horsemen of the apocalypse - pestilence, war, famine and death - so familiar during the middle ages, appeared again in the modern world.
New 'superpowers'
Politically, the impact of the war was also great. The once great powers of Japan and Germany looked as though they would never rise again. In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see that their peoples, highly educated and skilled, possessed the capacity to rebuild their shattered societies. (And it may have been easier to build strong economies from scratch than the partially damaged ones of the victors.) Two powers, so great that the new term "superpower" had to be coined for them, dominated the world in 1945. The United States was both a military power and an economic one; the Soviet Union had only brute force and the intangible attraction of Marxist ideology to keep its own people down and manage its newly acquired empire in the heart of Europe.

The great European empires, which had controlled so much of the world, from Africa to Asia, were on their last legs and soon to disappear in the face of their own weakness and rising nationalist movements. We should not view the war as being responsible for all of this, however; the rise of the US and the Soviet Union and the weakening of the European empires had been happening long before 1939. The war acted as an accelerator.

It also accelerated change in other ways: in science and technology, for example. The world got atomic weapons but it also got atomic power. Under the stimulus of war, governments poured resources into developing new medicines and technologies. Without the war, it would have taken us much longer, if ever, to enjoy the benefits of penicillin, microwaves, computers - the list goes on. In many countries, social change also speeded up.

The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years strengthened the belief in most democracies that governments had an obligation to provide basic care for all citizens. When it was elected in the summer of 1945, for example, the Labour government in Britain moved rapidly to establish the welfare state. The rights of women also took a huge step forward as their contribution to the war effort, and their share in the suffering, were recognised. In France and Italy, women finally got the vote.

If class divisions in Europe and Asia did not disappear, the moral authority and prestige of the ruling classes had been severely undermined by their failure to prevent the war or the crimes that they had condoned before and during it. Established political orders - fascist, conservative, even democratic - came under challenge as peoples looked for new ideas and leaders. In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root.

In China, people turned increasingly from the corrupt and incompetent nationalists to the communists. While many Europeans, wearied by years of war and privation, gave up on politics altogether and faced the future with glum pessimism, others hoped that, at last, the time had come to build a new and better society. In western Europe, voters turned to social democratic parties such as the Labour party in Britain. In the east, the new communist regimes that were imposed by the triumphant Soviet Union were at first welcomed by many as the agents of change.

The end of the war inevitably also brought a settling of scores. In many parts people took measures into their own hands. Collaborators were beaten, lynched or shot. Women who had fraternised with German soldiers had their heads shaved or worse. Governments sometimes followed suit, setting up special courts for those who had worked with the enemy and purging such bodies as the civil service and the police. The Soviets also tried to exact reparations from Germany and Japan; whole factories were dismantled down to the window frames and were carted off to the Soviet Union, where they frequently rotted away. Much of the revenge was to gain advantage in the postwar world. In China and eastern Europe the communists used the accusation of collaboration with the Japanese or the Nazis to eliminate their political and class enemies.
German de-Nazification
The allies instituted an ambitious programme of de-Nazification in Germany, later quietly abandoned as it became clear that German society would be unworkable if all former Nazis were forbidden to work. In Japan, the head of the occupation, General Douglas MacArthur, broke up the zaibatsu, the big conglomerates that were blamed for supporting the Japanese militarists, and introduced a range of reforms, from a new school curriculum to a democratic constitution, that were designed to turn Japan into a peaceable democratic nation. In both Germany and Japan, the victors set up special tribunals to try those responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the catalogue of horrors that came increasingly to be known as "crimes against humanity".

In Tokyo, leading Japanese generals and politicians, and at Nuremberg, senior Nazis (those that had not committed suicide or escaped), stood in the dock before allied judges. Not a few people then and since wondered if the trials were merely victors' justice, their moral authority undercut by the presence, in Nuremberg, of judges and prosecutors from Stalin's murderous regime, and by the fact that in Tokyo, the emperor, in whose name the crimes had been committed, was shielded from blame.

The trials, inconclusive though they were, formed part of a larger attempt to root out the militaristic and chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to produce the war, and to build a new world order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. Well before the war had ended, the allies had started planning for the peace. Among the western powers, the United States, by 1945 very much the dominant partner in the alliance, took the lead.

In his Four Freedoms speech of January 1941, President Roosevelt talked of a new and more just world, with freedom of speech and expression and of religion, and freedom from want and fear. In the Atlantic charter later that year, he and Churchill sketched out a world order based on such liberal principles as collective security, national self-determination, and free trade among nations. A host of other allies, some of them represented by governments in exile, signed on.

The Soviet Union gave a qualified assent, although its leader Stalin had no intention of following what were to him alien principles. Roosevelt intended that the American vision should take solid institutional form. The key organisation was the United Nations, designed to be stronger than the League of Nations, which it was replacing, and the economic ones known collectively as the Bretton Woods system, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. This time, Roosevelt was determined, the United States should join. Stalin again gave grudging support.
Common humanity
While much of what Roosevelt hoped for did not come about, it was surely a step forward for international relations that such institutions were created and largely accepted and, equally important, that they were underpinned by notions of a common humanity possessing the same universal rights. The idea that there were universal standards to be upheld was present, no matter how imperfectly, in the war crimes trials, and was later reinforced by the establishment of the United Nations itself in 1945, the International Court of Justice in 1946 and Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

It had already become clear at the top-level conferences of Teheran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July-August 1945) that there was a gulf in what constituted universal values and goals between the United States and its fellow democracies and the Soviet Union. Stalin was interested above all in security for his regime and for the Soviet Union, and that to him meant taking territory, from Poland and other neighbours, and establishing a ring of buffer states around Soviet borders. In the longer run, where the western powers saw a democratic and liberal world, he dreamed of a communist one.

The grand alliance held together uneasily for the first months of the peace, but the strains were evident in their shared occupation of Germany, where increasingly the Soviet zone of occupation was moving in a communist direction and the western zones, under Britain, France and the United States, in a more capitalist and democratic one.

By 1947, two very different German societies were emerging. In addition, the western powers watched with growing consternation and alarm the elimination of non-communist political forces in eastern Europe and the establishment of Peoples' Republics under the thumb of the Soviet Union. Soviet pressure on its neighbours, from Norway in the north to Turkey and Iran in the south, along with Soviet spy rings and Soviet-inspired sabotage in western countries, further deepened western concerns. For their part, Soviet leaders looked on western talk of such democratic procedures as free elections in eastern Europe as Trojan horses designed to undermine their control of their buffer states, and regarded the Marshall plan, which funnelled American aid into Europe, as a cover for extending the grip of capitalism. Furthermore, their own Marxist-Leninist analysis of history told them that sooner or later the capitalist powers would turn on the Soviet Union. Within two years of second world war's end, the cold war was an established fact.

Both sides built military alliances and prepared for the new shooting war that many feared was bound to come. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, giving it parity, at least in that area, with the United States. That the cold war did not in the end turn into a hot one was thanks to that fact. The terrifying new power of atomic weapons was to lead to a standoff suitably known as Mad - Mutually Assured Destruction.

The cold war overshadowed another momentous international change that came as a result of the second world war. Before 1939 much of the non-European world had been divided up among the great empires: the ones based in western Europe but also those of Japan and the Soviet Union. Japan and Italy lost their empires as a result of defeat. Britain, France, and the Netherlands all saw their imperial possessions disappear in the years immediately after the war. (The Soviet Union was not to lose its until the end of the cold war.)
Empires crumble
The former imperial powers no longer had the financial and military capacity to hang on to their vast territories. Nor did their peoples want to pay the price of empire, whether in money or blood. Furthermore, where the empires had once dealt with divided or acquiescent peoples, they now increasingly faced assertive and, in some cases, well-armed nationalist movements. The defeat of European forces all over Asia also contributed to destroying the myth of European power.

The British pulled out of India in 1947, leaving behind two new countries of India and Pakistan. Burma, Sri Lanka and Malaysia followed the road of independence not long after. The Dutch fought a losing war but finally conceded independence to Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, in 1949. France tried to regain its colonies in Indochina but was forced out in 1954 after a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnamese forces. The Europeans' African empires crumbled in the 1950s and early 1960s. The United Nations grew from 51 nations in 1945 to 189 by the end of the century.

Because of the cold war, there was no comprehensive peace settlement after the second world war as there had been in 1919. Instead there were a number of separate agreements or ad hoc decisions. In Europe most of the borders that had been established at the end of the first world war were restored.

The Soviet Union seized back some bits of territory such as Bessarabia, which it had lost to Romania in 1919. The one major exception was Poland, as the joke had it "a country on wheels", which moved some 200 miles to the west, losing some 69,000 sq metres to the Soviet Union and gaining slightly less from Germany in the west. In the east, Japan of course lost the conquests it had made since 1931, but was also obliged to disgorge Korea and Formosa (now Taiwan) and the Pacific islands that it had gained decades earlier. Eventually the United States and Japan concluded a formal peace in 1951. Because of an outstanding dispute over some islands, the Soviet Union and its successor Russia have not yet signed a peace treaty ending the war with Japan.
Remembering the war
We have long since absorbed and dealt with the physical consequences of the second world war, but it still remains a very powerful set of memories. How societies remember and commemorate the past often says something about how they see themselves - and can be highly contentious. Particularly in divided societies, it is tempting to cling to comforting myths to help bring unity and to paper over deep and painful divisions. In the years immediately after 1945, many societies chose to forget the war or remember it only in certain ways. Austria portrayed itself as the first victim of Nazism, conveniently ignoring the active support that so many Austrians had given the Nazi regime. In Italy, the fascist past was neglected in favour of the earlier periods of Italian history. For a long time, schools did not teach any history after the first world war. Italians were portrayed in films or books as essentially good-hearted and generally opposed to Mussolini, whose regime was an aberration in an otherwise liberal state.

In France, the Vichy period, after France's defeat by Germany, when there was widespread French collaboration, some of it enthusiastically antisemitic and pro-Nazi, was similarly ignored. From de Gaulle onwards, French leaders played up the resistance in such a way as to claim its moral authority but also to imply that it was more broadly based and widespread than it actually was.

West Germany was not able to escape its past so easily; under pressure from the allies and from within, it dealt much more thoroughly with its Nazi past. In West German schools, children learned about the horrors committed by the regime. East Germany, by contrast, took no responsibility, instead blaming the Nazis on capitalism. Indeed, many East Germans grew up believing that their country had fought with the Soviet Union against Hitler's regime.

In the east, Japan has been accused of ignoring its aggression in the 1930s and its own war crimes in China and elsewhere, but in recent years it has moved to teach more about this dark period in its history.

How should the past be remembered? When should we forget? These are not easy questions. Acknowledging such difficult parts of the past is not always easy and has led to history becoming a political football in a number of countries. In Japan, the conservatives minimise Japanese responsibility for the war and downplay atrocities on nationalist grounds. Japan, they argue, should not apologise for the past when all powers were guilty of aggression.

It has not necessarily been easier among the nations on the winning side. When French and foreign historians first began examining the Vichy period in France critically, they were attacked from both the right and the left for stirring up memories that were best left undisturbed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was, for a time, a willingness among Russians to acknowledge that many crimes were committed in Stalin's regime in the course of the war, whether the mass murder of Polish army officers at Katyn or the forcible deportation of innocent Soviet citizens to Siberia.

Today, the conservatives argue that such criticism of the great patriotic war only gives comfort to Russia's foes. Britain and Canada played a major role in the mass bombing campaign of German cities and towns; suggestions that the destruction of Dresden or other targets that may have had little military significance might be war crimes causes impassioned debate in both countries. That the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been morally wrong or unnecessary causes equal controversy in the United States.

Today, particularly in the countries that were on the winning side, there is a reluctance to disturb our generally positive memories of the war by facing such issues. The second world war, especially in the light of what came after, seems to be the last morally unambiguous war. The Nazis and their allies were bad and they did evil things. The allies were good and right to fight them.

That is true, but the picture is not quite as black and white as we might like to think. After all, one ally was the Soviet Union, in its own way as guilty of crimes against humanity as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy or Japan. Britain and France may have been fighting for liberty, but they were not prepared to extend it to their empires. And Dresden, or the firebombing of Hamburg, Tokyo and Berlin, the forcible repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should remind us that bad things can be done in the name of good causes. Let us remember the war, but let us not remember it simplistically but in all its complexity.
Margaret MacMillan is the warden of St Antony's college and a professor of international history at the University of Oxford. Her books include Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001) and Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao (2006). Her most recent book is The Uses and Abuses of History (2008)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rebuilding the world after the second world war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Margaret MacMillan: The second world war caused unprecedented hardship, but it also accelerated change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Second World War was for the Brits a very important turning point. A cornerstone in how the public and its elite perceived the future of the British Isles as a country and political regime. WW2 was the moment of utmost importance which brought people belonging to all classes - the home front - together. They had a common purpose and that was to support their fellow countrymen who were on the front defending them and their liberal beliefs. Yet, this maybe simple act of supporting the army and the extraordinary one of being seemingly unaffected by the Nazi-unleashed Blitz had long term effects. Everybody knew that when the war ended, nothing was going to be the same. Politically as well as socially.
During the war, the Brits lived with the everyday fear of experiencing a violent death at every single moment. In turn, this caused the authorities to demand that all the house and street lights be turned off at night. In November 1939, a poll of the 1937-founded organization Mass Observation found that the so called blackout was the single most hated inconvenient of war.

Thus, the Londoners were unable to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night( Bonfire Night) and to decorate the capital with festive lights.Besides this, people were afraid of being robbed (however, thieves avoided breaking into houses during the blackout because they had no idea whether people left them or still live there), women of being raped and when the winter set in, everybodysuffered psychologically, because they had to reduce their already very restricted social activity. Yet, they did not give up. Since the Government suppressed BBC's TV broadcast, the English chose to listen to the radio. It was a very a very cheap alternative of going out which eased the psychological discomfort of living in complete darkness after dusk set in.
"There is no panic, no fear, no despair in London Town...London can take it" The Spirit of the Blitz-Quentin Reynolds, American columnist, Colliers Weekly Magazine
Although the war brought jobs for only 1, 9 million women (in 1943, 6, 7 million of women had a job and 1939 - 4, 8), it very much affected the way people perceived societal roles:it meant that women had to take on jobs previously considered to be only for men. Women could be considered for positions such as engineers or in metallurgical, chemical and transport fields. Never again were women put in the position of giving up their new found independence and freedom. Although it still persisted in spirit, crass discrimination was no longer possible and employers had to take on women for jobs previously only assigned to men.

So, even though the WW2 could have effectively destroyed the British society and its entire political existence, it actually transformed it into something new. The experience of war very much changed how the people perceived the state and its involvement in their lives. If, in the beginning, the Government followed the pattern of the classical liberal state, during the war, it had to have a more hands-on approach. And this meant evolutions which were against the very liberal traditions of the British Empire such as the compulsory military service or against what it was thought as normal - for instance, women being viewed as the only ones to take care of children and the household.
The Battle of Britain is about to begin-We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;we shall never surrender! Prime Minister Winston Churchill, June, 4th, 1940
However, the morale of the population was very high and even when defeat was visible - such as the one at Dunkirk - they not give up believing that they get through it. No matter how high the price for winning over Hitler, the Brits would pay it and the authorities had to pay it too. They had to change policies and integrate those who were ignored until then, but had an important input whereas the war effort was concerned. Prime Minister Churchill tried to prohibit every discussion concerning the future of the country, but he was unable to control people's minds. And everybody knew that at the end of the Second World War, there will be a new Great Britain. And it was in more than one way:London gradually lost its empire and the English state was made up of only the British Isles while it also became a welfare state. The society was somehow rewarded for the big input it had in winning the battle against the Nazi totalitarianism and all the deprivations that it suffered during the war.
"Our working men and women have responded magnificently to any and every call made upon them. Their reward First Lord of the Admiralty, Albert Alexander must be a New Britain. Never again must the unemployed become the forgotten men of peace"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How did the Second World War affect the British Society?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Second World War was for the Brits a very important turning point. A cornerstone in how the public and its elite perceived the future of the British Isles as a country and political regime. WW2 was the moment of utmost importance which brought people belonging to all classes - the home front - together.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Schlieffen's idea was that, by invading far to the west and wheeling south-west of Paris, the right wing of the German army would envelop Paris and bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Apparently Count Schlieffen's last words on his death-bed in 1913 were: "Keep the right wing strong".

In the event, the German 1st Army turned eastwards early in support of the 2nd Army, the advance of which was stalled by the French. The exposed German flank gave the French an opportunity to counterattack with British support. The Battle of the Marne brought the German invasion to a halt and led to four years of trench warfare.

The Schlieffen Plan was instrumental in bringing Britain into the war. Had the plan been implemented as intended, it might well have led to the early capitulation of France, as happened more than 25 years later.

Terry Lloyd
Darley Abbey, Derbyshire

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Britain was drawn into the First World War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Schlieffen's idea was that, by invading far to the west and wheeling south-west of Paris, the right wing of the German army would envelop Paris and bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Apparently Count Schlieffen's last words on his death-bed in 1913 were: "Keep the right wing strong".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Germany rearms

The impediment to a lasting peace was Germany's treatment at Versailles. France insisted that vindictive and punitive terms be inflicted upon its neighbour to satisfy its need for security.

The Versailles Treaty removed four million of Germany's inhabitants in territorial transfers, most of its industrial wealth, and destabilised the entire structure of German society.

Before 1914, Germany had been the dynamo of the European economy. Economic misery and despair over her reduced status as a pariah nation paved the way in the post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions.

Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, on a programme to reverse the Versailles Treaty. He withdrew from the disarmament conference and left the League of Nations.

The concepts of disarmament as a universal panacea and collective security to be enforced by the League of Nations were dead.

They had already been exposed as hollow when the isolationist American congress prevented the United States from joining the League, and after the League failed to take action against Japan for seizing Manchuria in 1931.

Disappointed by her gains at the peace conference, Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, while Germany created the air force Versailles had forbidden, began rearming and invaded the Rhineland up to the French border in 1936.

Britain escaped the extremist totalitarian movements that gained a stranglehold on much of the continent in the 1920s and 1930s. Few Britons, for example, joined Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.

Its members became notorious for their attempts to intimidate Jewish people, whom Mosley was convinced were behind the 'communist threat' Bolshevik Russia was strongly thought to pose in the inter-war years.

Britain's long traditions of consultation and belief in parliamentary democracy helped it to weather the storms of post-war life, though it was dogged by slumps and strikes.

Depression

Two of the questions that bedevilled British politics before 1914 - women's suffrage and Irish home rule - were no longer at issue.

Women got the vote without difficulty in 1918 after four years of doing the civilian work of three million men who had been away fighting in the army - in munitions factories, on the land and as nurses on the Western Front.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Lloyd George had decided Britain could not win southern Ireland's war of independence, begun in 1919 by the revolutionary Irish party Sinn Fein. The period saw southern Ireland become a independent republic in all but name.

The real concern was the economy. The European economic system had still not properly recovered 11 years after the war had ended. This problem had been masked by America's generous willingness to bail Europe out.

But in 1929, a financial meltdown in New York, known as the Wall Street Crash, began a worldwide economic depression. America had to withdraw her massive loans to Europe.

Germany's tottering economy completely collapsed, which in turn brought Hitler to power.

If the period before 1929 was in many ways a period of hope, in that the world seemed to be recovering from the trauma of war, the Depression put paid to it.

In Britain in the 1930s, unemployment soared to levels the country had never experienced before. In 1931, proposed benefit cuts saw most ministers resigning from the Labour government.

Ramsay Macdonald was left as prime minister of what was known as the National Government, for it was a cross-party coalition containing members of the Conservative and Liberal parties.

Going off the 'gold standard' in September 1931 made the pound cheap and British goods cheaper, and the export trade began to revive. But Macdonald was despised as a 'class traitor' by many Labour voters.

In November 1935 he was replaced as prime minister by the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, for the National Government now had a majority of Conservative MPs.

World War Two

The horror of trench warfare 20 years earlier convinced British forces chiefs that the war had to be won in the air. But the air battle did not take place until August 1940, after Belgium, Holland and France had all fallen to a concerted Nazi invasion begun on 10 May.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill rejected a separate peace in Europe, and Britain stood alone against 2,000 miles of hostile coastline.

The Battle of Britain, fought between Allied and German pilots in British skies during the summer of 1940, was the first significant defeat Nazi Germany suffered since the war had begun a year earlier.

But even if Britain was not to be invaded (and by early 1941 Hitler had instead set his sights on the Soviet Union) it could still be greatly damaged. The bombing of London and other cities, known as the Blitz, continued.

For Britain, with its empire, the war was always going to be worldwide, since British troops were needed in the Middle East to defend interests there, as well as the route to India.

But Germany's ally Japan had her eye on the French and British Far Eastern colonies. On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked American ships at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and what had basically been a European conflict became truly global.

The combination of Germany's war against Russia from June 1941, and the Americans' entry into the war later that year, meant that the Axis powers' time was limited.

The Allies were victorious in North Africa in May 1943 and invaded Italy in July of the same year. In June 1944 a massive Allied force landed on the Normandy coast in France, and Paris was liberated in August 1944.

At the end of April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin as the city was besieged by Soviet troops. The Japanese only surrendered in August 1945 after atom bombs were dropped on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in preference to fighting a long land war.

Meanwhile the British Empire was a shadow of its former self. Anti-colonial feeling and independence was in the air among British possessions in Africa and Asia.

After 1945, the Pacific Rim countries made treaties with America to protect them, for it was American troops who had saved Australia from invasion by the Japanese.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The impediment to a lasting peace was Germany's treatment at Versailles. France insisted that vindictive and punitive terms be inflicted upon its neighbour to satisfy its need for security. The Versailles Treaty removed four million of Germany's inhabitants in territorial transfers, most of its industrial wealth, and destabilised the entire structure of German society.

# data[].attributes.headline
What happened to England during world war two?

# data[].attributes.subject
What happened to England during world war two?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contents

1. Herman Göring and the Luftwaffe

2. Operation Sea Lion

3. Churchill's "Finest Hour" Speech

4. Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Messerschmitt BF-109

5. Blitz Begins

6. Who Won the Battle of Britain?

7. Why Did the British Win the Battle of Britain?

8. Significance of the Battle of Britain

9. The Battle of Britain Movie

The Battle of Britain in World War II was between Britain's Royal Air Force ( RAF) and the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany's air force, and was the first battle in history fought solely in the air. From July 10 through October 31, 1940, pilots and support crews on both sides took to the skies and battled for control of airspace over Great Britain, Germany and the English Channel. The powerful, combat-experienced Luftwaffe hoped to conquer Britain easily, but the RAF proved a formidable enemy.
WATCH: World War II Documentaries on HISTORY Vault
Herman Göring and the Luftwaffe

After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to have an air force. With the help of the Soviet Union, however, Germany secretly defied the treaty and trained air force pilots and support staff on combat planes.

When Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich came to power, Nazi Germany began rebuilding their air force. He officially created the Luftwaffe in February 1935, placing former World War I fighter pilot and political ally Hermann Göring in charge.
WATCH VIDEO: Winston S. Churchill
Operation Sea Lion

By the start of World War II in 1939, the Luftwaffe was the strongest and best-trained air force in the world. They played a crucial role in Germany's swift, methodical and highly effective blitzkrieg invasion of much of Western Europe, including Poland, Holland, Belgium and France.

After France fell to Germany on June 22, 1940, Hitler set his sights on the Soviet Union but still had to contend with Great Britain. He planned a massive invasion by land and sea, code named Operation Sea Lion, but knew he needed to defeat the RAF first.

Hitler hoped his Luftwaffe and its fierce reputation would intimidate Britain enough that they would surrender peacefully, and even dangled the prospect of a peace treaty. However, he underestimated the resolve of Britain's people, its military and its combative new prime minister, Winston Churchill, who rejected the offer outright.

Churchill believed Hitler and the evils of Nazism had to be abolished no matter what. He knew that the RAF was Britain's main defense against German troops crossing the English Channel.

Did you know? The battle received its name from a speech Winston Churchill delivered to the British House of Commons on June 18, 1940, in which he stated, "the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

Churchill's "Finest Hour" Speech

Days before France's surrender, Churchill gave his famous " Finest Hour" speech to the House of Commons, making it clear he had no intention of capitulating to Hitler, although some members of Parliament hoped to negotiate peace.

In his speech, Churchill said, "the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin." He spoke of his certainty that the Luftwaffe would attack Britain hard, but also his confidence that the RAF, commanded by Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, would hold their own and be victorious.

Churchill knew failure was not an option, and his powerful speech boosted the morale and patriotism of the British people, its military and Parliament.
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Winston Churchill
Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Messerschmitt BF-109

Hitler and many of his generals were unprepared to invade Britain. Göring, however, was confident his Luftwaffe would quickly destroy the RAF with his German bombers and prevent, or at least postpone, the need for a full-scale invasion; Hitler gave him the go-ahead to prove it.

On July 10, 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked Britain, performing reconnaissance missions and targeting coastal defenses, ports and radar stations. Their efforts, however, did little damage to the RAF.

In mid-August, using mostly single-engine Messerschmitt BF-109 combat planes, the Luftwaffe began attacking Britain's airfields, air fighter production sites and targeting RAF Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes in the air.

Blitz Begins

Despite being outnumbered, the RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin. Enraged, Hitler and Göring changed tactics and ordered a bombing campaign known as " the Blitz " against London, Liverpool, Coventry and other major cities, hoping to decimate the morale of the British people. To ensure massive casualties and to avoid aerial dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, German bombing was carried out at night.

On September 15, the Luftwaffe began two massive raids on London, eager to force the British to the negotiating table, but they could not defeat the RAF or gain control of British airspace. The Luftwaffe was by then stretched too thin, poorly organized and unable to keep up with the demand for new fighter planes or overcome the RAF's superior technology.

Who Won the Battle of Britain?

By the end of October 1940, Hitler called off his planned invasion of Britain and the Battle of Britain ended. Both sides suffered enormous loss of life and aircraft. Still, Britain weakened the Luftwaffe and prevented Germany from achieving air superiority. It was the first major defeat of the war for Hitler.

Although Britain stood alone against Germany after the fall of France, nearly a quarter of the RAF pilots who participated in the Battle of Britain were from other countries including Poland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, the United States and South Africa.

Why Did the British Win the Battle of Britain?

The British won the Battle of Britain due to a confluence of factors. They were defending their home territory, so were more motivated to succeed, and also knew the local geography better than the invaders.

Another major factor was the Dowding System, named after Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief of the RAF Fighting Command. The Dowding System's pioneering use of radar (which could warn the RAF of enemy attacks), aircraft and ground defense gave Great Britain a competitive advantage.

Significance of the Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain was a turning point in World War II; if the RAF had not held off the Luftwaffe, Hitler would have likely moved forward with his Operation Sea Lion land invasion of the British Isles. This would have been devastating to the British people and all efforts to stem Hitler's rise to power. Germany needed to control the English Channel to invade Britain, and the battle prevented them from gaining that valuable control.

Britain's victory in the Battle of Britain demonstrated the courage and resilience of the country's military and its people and allowed them to remain free from Nazi occupation. It also enabled the Americans to establish a base of operations in England to invade Normandy on D-Day in 1944.
READ MORE: D:Day: An Interactive
The Battle of Britain Movie

The Battle of Britain's significance was not lost on Hollywood. In 1969, MGM released the movie The Battle of Britain, starring Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw and Laurence Olivier as commander Hugh Dowding.

Other notable productions include: Battle of Britain, a documentary produced by brothers Colin and Ewan McGregor to mark the event's 70th anniversary; Voices of the Battle of Britain, a documentary which includes first-hand accounts of RAF veterans; and Mission of Honor, a movie which tells the story of RAF Hurricane Squadron 303.

Sources

Battle of Britain. International Churchill Society.
Battle of Britain. WW 2 Facts.
How the Luftwaffe Fought the Battle of Britain. Imperial War Museum.
The Battle of Britain: A Brief Guide. Military History Matters.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Herman Göring and the Luftwaffe Operation Sea Lion Churchill's "Finest Hour" Speech Hawker Hurricane, Supermarine Spitfire, Messerschmitt BF-109 Blitz Begins Who Won the Battle of Britain? Why Did the British Win the Battle of Britain?