The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 29

(19311962)

IN A NUTSh.e.l.l.

The collapse of the U.S. economy in late 1929 greatly exacerbated the rest of the planet's financial woes. By 1932, the world's economic output had dropped 40 percent, and it would take five more years for the global economy to reach 1929 levels again.

Human nature being what it is, people looked around for someone to blame. In the Soviet Union, it was the capitalists of the West. In the United States, it was the Republicans. In China, it was the Communists. In Germany-most ominously-it was the Jews. The blame game combined with the postWorld War I decline of monarchies to open the door for waves of nationalism. Countries increasingly hungered for their own ident.i.ty, a hunger often whetted by individuals' hunger for power: former schoolteacher Benito Mussolini in Italy; military officer Francisco Franco in Spain; military officer Hideki Tojo in j.a.pan; failed painter Adolf Hitler in Germany; and seminary student turned bank robber Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

So, you combine a crippled world economy, a hunger for national ident.i.ty, and a collection of monsters masquerading as men, and what you ultimately get is a very big war.

The group that would become known as the Axis Powers-Germany, Italy, and j.a.pan-warmed up for war with fighting in Manchuria, China, Ethiopia, and Spain. In 1939, after rolling over Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germany finally ignited the firestorm by invading Poland.

Allied against the Axis were, well, the Allies. Led by Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the allied forces turned the tide of war by the end of 1943. Before the war's end in 1945, however, the world would endure two of history's worst nightmares: the use of nuclear weapons, and the Holocaust.

After the war, most of Eastern Europe fell under an "iron curtain" of Soviet control. In Asia, meanwhile, Communists under Mao Zedong finally won their twenty-five-year struggle with the Nationalist government and took control of the world's most populous nation in 1949.

Western powers dug in to confront the spread of communism. In 1948, the USSR blockaded land routes into the city of Berlin and eventually built a wall cutting the city in half. One side was controlled by the Communist government of East Germany and the other by West Germany.

A much more violent confrontation occurred on the Korean Peninsula. Korea had been part.i.tioned after the war into two countries, with a Soviet-backed Communist state in the North and a U.S.-backed capitalist state in the South. After three years of intense fighting, the two sides agreed in 1953 to an armistice, redrawing the border almost exactly where it had been when the fighting started.

By the end of the 1950s, the world had divided itself politically into three basic groups: Communist, capitalist, and non-aligned nations, labeled the third world. But not every conflict revolved around Communist versus anticommunist.

India, the world's second most populous nation, finally won its independence from the British Empire in 1947 after decades of often violent civil unrest. In the Middle East, the creation of the Jewish state of Israel triggered a war with neighboring Islamic countries and kicked off what proved to be a more-or-less continual conflict in the region.

To be fair to the species, mankind did make some pretty impressive scientific and medical strides during the period. There was the invention of the transistor and the first electronic computer, the discovery of vaccines for the dreaded childhood disease of polio, the refining of the use of antibiotics to fight infections, the development of synthetic fibers such as nylon, the launching of the first manmade earth-orbiting satellites-and the blossoming of television.

But there was a mushroom-shaped shadow constantly hanging over the planet. By 1949, thanks in large part to successfully spying on U.S. programs, the Soviet Union had its own nuclear weapons. Great Britain had them by 1952, France by 1960, and China by 1964.

The mushroom shadow was perhaps at its darkest in the fall of 1962, when U.S. spy planes discovered that Soviet missiles were being deployed in the Communist island nation of Cuba. For the better part of two weeks, the world held its breath, poised on what seemed to be the brink of nuclear war. Fortunately, both sides kept their cool. The Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba, the U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Life went somewhat nervously on.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

Sept. 23, 1932 The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is founded.

Jan. 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler begins 12-year span as dictator of Germany.

Mar. 4, 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt begins 12-year span as U.S. president.

Oct. 16, 1934 Chinese Communist forces begin what will be a year-long, 6,000-mile retreat from Nationalist forces.

Sept. 15, 1935 Germany adopts the Nuremberg Laws, which strip German Jews of most of their legal and human rights.

Nov. 11, 1935 The first official trans-Pacific airmail flight leaves San Francisco. It arrives in Manila a week later.

Sept. 1, 1939 World War II begins as Germany attacks Poland.

June 4, 1940 The last of 340,000 French and British troops are evacuated from the French beaches of Dunkirk.

Apr. 1, 1940 The world's first electron microscope is demonstrated at the RCA laboratories in Camden, New Jersey.

June 22, 1941 German troops invade the Soviet Union, ending the two nations' alliance of convenience.

June 6, 1944 D-Day: More than 170,000 Allied troops land on beaches in France's Normandy province.

Apr. 12, 1945 President Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Apr. 30, 1945 Adolf Hitler commits suicide as Soviet troops converge on Berlin.

May 8, 1945 World War II ends in Europe.

Aug. 10, 1945 j.a.panese leaders sue for peace. U.S. president Harry Truman declares victory on August 14.

Jan. 10, 1946 The United Nations opens its first General a.s.sembly session, in London.

Aug. 29, 1949 The Soviet Union successfully detonates an atomic bomb at a test site in Kazakhstan.

Oct. 1, 1949 The People's Republic of China is proclaimed.

Oct. 2, 1952 Britain joins the United States and the Soviet Union as a nuclear power.

Mar. 6, 1957 Ghana, formerly called the Gold Coast, becomes the first sub-Saharan African state to win independence.

Oct. 4, 1957 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, the world's first man-made earth-orbiting satellite.

Jan. 1, 1959 Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista flees the island and is replaced by rebel leader Fidel Castro after a two-year civil war.

Feb. 13, 1960 France explodes an atomic bomb at a test site in the Sahara Desert.

Apr. 17, 1961 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Florida invade the Caribbean island.

The Next One The 50-cent Version Germany started taking over parts of Europe; j.a.pan started taking over parts of Asia. France and Great Britain objected, militarily, and formed the Allied Powers. Italy lined up with Germany and j.a.pan to form the Axis Powers. The Soviet Union allied itself with Germany, until it was double-crossed, then it switched to the Allies. j.a.pan goofed big-time by attacking the United States, which joined the Allies. The Axis Powers eventually ran out of gas-and other things. Germany and Italy surrendered. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on j.a.pan, and it surrendered. World War II was over. The Cold War started almost immediately.The $9.99 Version The first dress rehearsal for World War II took place in Ethiopia in 1935, when Italian forces invaded what was one of the very few independent African states. In 1936, a rebellion in Spain led to a three-year civil war that was eventually won by forces under dictator-in-waiting Francisco Franco. Franco's forces were backed by military support from Germany and Italy.As in Ethiopia, the Spanish conflict emboldened the most rapacious of the nationalist leaders, Germany's Adolf Hitler. Starting in 1936, Germany began a series of moves on other people's territory: a demilitarized area between France and Germany called the Rhineland, followed by Austria, then Czechoslovakia. All the while, European powers Great Britain and France dithered and hesitated, while the United States clung to the hope that it could stay out of another European war, as it had not been able to do in 1917.In Asia, j.a.pan was every bit as aggressive as Germany. In 1931, the j.a.panese invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria, and in 1937 began the conquest of large sections of China. Three years later, j.a.pan expanded its hostile takeover bids into French Indochina (now Vietnam).In the fall of 1939, Hitler moved into Poland, which finally proved a country too far for France and Britain, who declared war on Germany. After six months of diplomatic posturing, Germany invaded France in May 1940, and World War II was on in earnest.Take a good look around Warsaw. This is how I can deal with any European city.-Adolf Hitler on a tour of the conquered Polish capital with foreign journalists, October 5, 1939 The final major players entered the fray in 1941, when Germany launched a surprise attack on its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, and j.a.pan tried to destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet by bombing the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.While the Axis Powers-Italy, Germany and j.a.pan-initially had the best of things, the tide began to turn in 1943 in favor of the Allies, led by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The Germans were driven out of North Africa and suffered tremendous losses in the Soviet Union after invading that country. In the Pacific, U.S. aircraft carriers that had escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor led decisive victories over the j.a.panese at the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway Island.Nuts.-U.S. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, responding to German demands that he surrender his 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge at Bastogne, France, on December 24, 1944. The 101st held until relieved.

By mid-1944, Allied forces had established a foothold in France, and by mid-1945, Germany and Italy were defeated. j.a.pan, which had been steadily retreating since the beginning of 1943, continued to fight. But a weapon developed in America-in large part by scientists who had fled the totalitarian regimes in Europe-would take the fight out of the j.a.panese.On August 6, 1945, a U.S. atomic bomb obliterated the city of Hiros.h.i.+ma, killing seventy thousand people. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki met a similar fate. Five days after that, j.a.pan unconditionally surrendered, making it formal on September 2. World War II was over.The cost of the war was literally incalculable. Estimates of the total number of military personnel and civilians killed have ranged as high as seventy million. More than 20 percent of the entire prewar population of Poland, and 10 percent of the prewar populations of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union died. Nearly ninety thousand Soviet cities and villages were destroyed.Many of the civilians killed were the "incidental" victims of the various countries' brutally efficient war machines. But millions were the victims of deliberate and horrific murder. The most atrocious acts were committed by Hitler's n.a.z.is, whose "Final Solution" saw the systematic extermination of six million Jews and millions of other "undesirables," who ranged from the disabled and infirm to Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses.

THE NUCLEAR RACQUET.

On December 2, 1942, on a racquet court under a football stadium at the University of Chicago, scientists fired up the world's first artificial nuclear reactor-a harbinger to building atomic weapons-for thirty-three minutes. The lead scientist, Enrico Fermi, had fled Italy because his wife was Jewish.

SPINNING THE GLOBE.

Africa: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [image]

While the fervor for nationalism continued to ferment on the African continent after the end of World War I, there was little significant progress toward independence during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, during these decades the most significant movement along these lines was backward.In October 1935, Italy used a border dispute between its Italian Somaliland colony and Ethiopia as an excuse to invade. Ethiopia was one of the few African nations not then under a European country's thumb, and had rebuffed an Italian conquest attempt in the 1890s.The war pitted Italian fighter planes and poison gas against Ethiopian warriors armed with spears. Predictably, the fight was over in eight months. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared the conquest the beginning of what would be a new Roman Empire. It turned out to be a short-lived empire. British troops pushed the Italians out of Ethiopia in 1941.Most of the rest of the fighting in Africa during the war occurred in the northern part of the continent. The fighting seesawed: The British pounded the Italians; the Germans beat up the British; and the British and United States eventually smashed the Germans. By May 1943, the war was effectively over in Africa.After the war's end, Africans' unrest began to grow in earnest. In 1946, an uprising broke out in Algeria against French rule. In 1952, the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya triggered a four-year fight between native Kenyans and the British.

When the reed buck horn is blown, if I leave a European farm before killing the European owner, may this oath kill me.-From the oath taken by members of the Mau Mau secret society

In 1956, the Israeli, British, and French forces invaded Egypt after the Egyptians, armed by the Soviet Union, decided to nationalize the Suez Ca.n.a.l. Under intense political pressure, the three countries eventually withdrew, and the ca.n.a.l, which links the Red and Mediterranean seas, fell under the supervision of the first-ever United Nations peacekeeping force.The Suez mess greatly weakened the international standing of Britain and France, and encouraged nationalism movements in other parts of Africa. Most European countries began to relinquish most of their holdings on the continent. In 1960 alone, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Belgium granted independence to sixteen African colonies. In 1962, after eight years of strife, France let go of Algeria.There were holdouts. Portugal did not give up its colonies in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, or Mozambique until the mid-1970s, and the British did not leave Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) until 1980. But for the most part, Africa's colonial days were over by the beginning of the 1960s.j.a.pan: On the Attack!

The economic woes of the late 1920s and early 1930s gave greater voice to the nationalist movement in j.a.pan, which wanted to break away from decades of emulating Western ways. After wresting power from pro-West politicians and businessmen (many of whom were killed after being wrested), nationalist radicals gave way to military leaders who rapidly built a formidable war machine.j.a.pan's first target was neighboring China. The Chinese province of Manchuria was taken in 1931, and a full-scale war was launched in 1937. Angered by a U.S. decision in mid-1941 to stop selling j.a.pan oil and sc.r.a.p metal, j.a.panese leaders attempted in December to cripple the U.S. Navy and/or discourage the Americans from getting involved in a Pacific war by attacking the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor. Both goals fell short, however, and by the end of 1942, j.a.pan was in retreat.After the war, the United States initially wanted to keep j.a.pan weak both militarily and industrially. The Korean War and the threat of a spread of communism changed America's mind, however, and j.a.pan was encouraged to rebuild its economy. j.a.panese labor and management cooperated with each other to an extent unknown in the West, and the country's economic output grew at a handsome 9.5 percent annual average during the 1950s.

BURNING DOWN TOKYO (AGAIN).

Although the nuclear bombings of Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki are more remembered by the world, the firebombing of Tokyo on March 910, 1945, has to rank as one of the most horrific experiences any city has ever suffered.Taking off from the Marianas Islands, 334 U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers-stripped of guns and some of their armor to make room for Napalm and more than 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs-swept over the j.a.panese capital in the darkness at alt.i.tudes between 4,000 and 9,000 feet.Two hours later, Tokyo was afire. The brisk winds whipped the flames from building to building, and the heat was so intense that steel beams melted. People who hurled themselves into the city's ca.n.a.ls to escape the fire were boiled, or asphyxiated by the smoke.More than fifteen square miles of the city were destroyed, and estimates of the death toll ranged from eighty thousand to two hundred thousand, more than were killed by either of the two atomic bombs. After the bombing of Tokyo, similar sorties were conducted by U.S. bombers against three other j.a.panese cities. Fewer than forty U.S. planes were lost in all the raids combined.

China: Look Before You Leap In China, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek had broken in the mid-1920s with its former allies, the Communists. Under their charismatic leader Mao Zedong, the Communists embarked on a six-thousand-mile exodus to the northern province of Shensi. There they waited.After an alliance of convenience during the war, Mao's forces resumed their fight with the Nationalist government, which was nominally a republic but in reality a dictators.h.i.+p. The Communist forces were swelled by millions of disaffected peasants, and by 1949, the Communists had driven Chiang Kai-Shek's forces out of mainland China and onto the island of Taiwan, about one hundred miles off the coast.Mao quickly began looking to export the new government's influence to neighbors. China took over Tibet in 1950, backed North Korea in its war against South Korea, and supplied Communist rebels in French Indochina.Mao had less luck at home, however. In 1958, the Chinese government launched what it called the "Great Leap Forward." This consisted of redistributing farmland, "collectivizing" villages, and redirecting the workforce into industry. The effort turned into a great flop backward. So much effort was put into the industrial push that not enough people were growing food. The result was a famine that killed an estimated thirty million people. The Great Leap was called off in 1961, and Mao was shunted aside for several years from the Chinese leaders.h.i.+p.French Indochina (aka Vietnam-to-Be): Carping with Diem In what was then called French Indochina, the aforementioned French returned after the j.a.panese departed. It wasn't their best idea. Vietnamese nationalists, and Communists called the Viet Minh, began rebelling, with Chinese and Soviet support. The French were driven out in 1954, and the country was part.i.tioned as Korea had been. A Communist state, led by a sixty-five-year-old former cook named Ho Chi Minh, was in the north; an anticommunist state, led by a fifty-five-year-old civil servant named Ngo Dinh Diem, was in the south.The international accord that had divided the country after the French left called for a 1956 election to reunify it. But Diem, figuring he would lose in the election to Ho, reneged on the deal. Ho promptly organized an army that was part militia, part guerillas, and part terrorists, called the Viet Cong. By 1962, Ho's forces controlled a big part of South Vietnam, and U.S. forces that had served largely as advisers to Diem's army began to take a more direct role in the fighting.

IN NAME ONLY...

In 1949, the country of Siam officially changed its name to Thailand, meaning "land of the free." That's the same country that went through a dozen military dictators.h.i.+ps and seventeen const.i.tutions between 1932 and 2007.

Europe: Welcome to Financial Rehab Recovery from the Great Depression in Europe was fragmented, with some countries rebounding faster than others. Germany, which had probably been hit hardest by the global economic collapse, actually was one of the first to recover. Hitler's government pumped public money into programs such as the construction of a highway system, creating lots of jobs. By the eve of the war, Germany's economy was one third bigger than it had been in 1929.

That man for chancellor? I'll make him a postmaster, and he can lick the stamps with my head on them.-German president Paul Von Hindenburg on Hitler's demand that he be made chancellor, August 13, 1932

In addition to economic troubles, much of Europe was under the shadow of despotism even before World War II broke out. Although most of the continent's nations were democracies after World War I, only eight-the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway-were still democracies in 1939. The rest had repressive governments or were outright dictators.h.i.+ps.After the war, most of the Continent was in shambles. More than twenty-five million European military personnel and civilians had been killed, and another sixteen million permanently displaced from their homes. The most influential part of the world before the war, Europe lost its military, political, and economic clout to the new superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.In spring 1947, U.S. secretary of state George Marshall persuaded President Harry Truman and Congress to generously finance Europe's economic recovery. Under the Marshall Plan, nearly $13 billion was provided between 1948 and 1952.But the s.h.i.+fting power base had effectively divided the continent. Eastern Europe became dominated by the USSR. In 1947 and 1948, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia all became Communist states. With the exception of Yugoslavia, all of them were under the Soviet thumb. Because the USSR blocked the Eastern European countries from taking part in the Marshall Plan, the Western European countries' postwar recovery was in most cases much faster.

ONE SORE LOSER.

Adolf Hitler hoped to use the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, to showcase his "Master Race" athletes. His plans were upset, however, by an African American named Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, and by other black athletes with good results. When the Olympic Committee requested that Hitler either congratulate all athletes or none, Hitler chose none.

Fearing the potentially violent spread of the Soviet sphere of influence, Western nations established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Members were pledged to mutual defense against Soviet aggression. The Communist countries countered in 1955 with formation of the Warsaw Pact.Members.h.i.+p in the Pact was not optional. In 1956, after Hungary quit the Warsaw Pact and demanded that the USSR remove its troops from inside the country, Soviet tanks rumbled into Hungary. Thousands were killed before the Hungarian Revolt was suppressed, and thousands more fled to the West.The Hungarian expatriates had plenty of company. Between 1949 and 1961, an estimated twenty-five million Germans left the Eastern part of the country, which was controlled by a Communist regime, for the West. On August 13, 1961, exasperated at the embarra.s.sing exodus, East German police began building what they called an "anti-fascist protection wall" between East and West Berlin. In West Berlin, it was called the "wall of shame."Soviet Union: I Don't Care What My Teachers Say, I'm Gonna Be a Superpower After consolidating his power in the 1920s, Stalin began pus.h.i.+ng hard to industrialize the country. Millions of farmers were turned into factory hands, seldom by choice. In 1926, about 80 percent of the population worked on farms. Within thirteen years, the percentage had fallen to slightly more than half. The effort met with some success, and by 1939, the USSR was one of the world's leading industrial powers.Stalin pursued his reign of terror against political enemies-real and imagined-as vigorously as he pushed for industrialization. Opponents who weren't killed-and millions were-were pushed into prison camps known as gulags, where they were used as slave labor. It's estimated that in 1930, Soviet gulags contained 179,000 prisoners. By 1934, the number was 500,000; by the time of Stalin's death, in 1953, it was close to 2 million.In June 1941, less than two years after its invasion of Poland started the war, Hitler's Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an all-out, fast-moving a.s.sault against its until-then ally. The Red Army, though larger than the German invasion force, was poorly trained and badly equipped, and German forces rolled quickly into Soviet territory. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war were systematically murdered by the Germans as troops pushed one thousand miles into the USSR.But by the winter of 1942, bad weather, a stubbornly courageous Soviet military, and a young general named Georgiy Zhukov combined with overextended German supply lines to halt the advance. By November 1944, the tide had turned and the badly beaten Germans were in full retreat.Though victorious, no country suffered more in World War II than the Soviet Union. An estimated twenty-six million-plus military personnel and civilians were killed. The country's meat and grain production was cut to half of prewar levels.Any progress the Soviet economy had made before the war was wiped out by the conflict, and Stalin reinst.i.tuted the forced modernization of industry and agriculture. Most of the industrial work focused on military equipment and heavy machinery rather than consumer goods.In March 1953, Stalin died. After three years of rule by a three-person collective, a sixty-two-year-old longtime Communist Party official named Nikita Khrushchev took over. Khrushchev adopted much less harsh governing methods than Stalin.

To American production, without which this war would have been lost.-A toast by Joseph Stalin at the Tehran conference with Churchill and Roosevelt, November 30, 1943

History is on our side. We will bury you.-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to Western diplomats at a Moscow reception, November 17, 1956

The emergence of the USSR and the United States as the world's two superpowers led to an intense rivalry between the two in areas outside the political and military realms. Both countries spent billions in a race to dominate the exploration, and possible exploitation, of outer s.p.a.ce, a race led mostly by the USSR during the 1950s.The two nations even argued about kitchen appliances. In 1959, U.S. vice president Richard Nixon visited the Soviet Union to serve as host at an exhibition of Western consumer goods. The visit was marked by a debate between Nixon and Khrushchev about the relative merits of Soviet was.h.i.+ng machines and blenders versus their U.S. counterparts, which culminated in the two world leaders poking each other in the chest with their fingers.But the "kitchen debate" bl.u.s.tering notwithstanding, the Soviet Union was in reality a superpower with a very strong military backbone and a very weak domestic economy.United States: Booming Economy, Booming Babies, Booming Anticommunism With the onset of the Great Depression, American voters decided to try a Democratic president for a change. Their choice was a New York politician who was crippled with polio and was a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt.The biggest attributes Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought to the White House were boundless optimism and seemingly limitless energy. In his first one hundred days, Roosevelt pushed through a plethora of programs designed to get the U.S. economy back on track: jobs for youths, bank reforms, civic redevelopment, ma.s.sive public works projects, and wage and price controls.

So first of all, let me a.s.sert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in his inaugural address, March 3, 1933