The end of World War II was supposed to represent a flowering of freedom. Instead, democracy and liberty found themselves snuffed out by the influence of the Soviet Union. While Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan lay in ruins and their victims freed, a new terror was to descend upon Europe and ultimately the entire world. The extremely strong hand that the U.S.S.R. possessed following the end of World War II in Europe helped make them into a global superpower, bringing other, unwilling nations under their brand of tyranny. The U.S. and U.K., weakened by their own war efforts and unable to wage a third war to retake the territories that the Soviets had seized, were forced to concede half of Europe to the menace of communism. “The End of the War” demonstrates how war exhaustion in the final months of World War II set the stage for the Cold War.
What ultimately ended World War II was the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, the deadliest weapon ever manufactured at that time. The detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 wiped out the resolve of the Japanese people and encouraged them to surrender days later (Foner 886-887). The attack itself symbolized how destructive the war had been to civilian populations, a rarity in European conflicts for the previous century (Foner 888).
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Beginning with the Tehran conference in 1943 and extending throughout 1945, the three principle Allied powers—the U.S., the U.K. and the U.S.S.R.—sought to seize as much power as possible. Since it was the Soviets who had done the bulk of the fighting from 1941 to the Normandy invasion in 1944, Joseph Stalin had managed to seize control of much of eastern Europe prior to Germany’s surrender (Foner 889). At the Yalta conference, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill acceded to Stalin’s demands to annex Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and much of eastern Poland, territory that had largely been part of Russia prior to the Revolution in 1917 (Foner 889-890). The Allies also devised what become known as the Bretton Woods system, in which the U.S. dollar replaced the British pound as the world’s reserve currency, and established the United Nations as a more muscular replacement for the failed League of Nations (Foner 889).
Following World War II, the old imperialist powers of Europe were either defeated or severely weakened. Despite winning the war, the U.K. had been drained both economically and militarily, with its old colonies agitating for independence (Foner 890). Germany and Japan lay in ruins, the post-World War II order severely restricting their power (Foner 890-891). Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. emerged as the world’s new powers. This led directly to the Cold War, as both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. jockeyed for global domination, fighting proxy wars and the like to establish capitalist and communist states. Moreover, the victories of the U.S. belied the problem of racial segregation and discrimination at home.
Ultimately, World War II was a Pyrrhic victory for freedom. While many nations and peoples were liberated from the Nazis and Japanese, the Iron Curtain descended upon Europe, dividing it and the world between capitalism and communism. The Allies’ cooperation with the Soviet Union led to a new evil being unleashed on the world at large.
- Foner, Eric. Give me liberty!: an American history. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Print.
