World War 2
The Aftermath
In the late summer of 1945 the world was exhausted by war. The cities of Germany and Japan had all but been levelled by Allied bombers. In Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by atomic bombs.
Huge areas of Europe and Southeast Asia had been devastated by the fighting. Road, rail and canal systems had been destroyed. Ports were choked with wreckage. In Europe, a severe drought followed by a disastrous harvest threatened famine in the worst-hit areas. In the western Soviet Union 25 million people were left homeless.
In Europe the future looked bleak. The wartime alliance between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union was fast breaking up. Europe was being divided into two separate and hostile camps; one in Eastern Europe already dominated by the Soviet Union, the other in Western Europe soon to be rescued from political and economic collapse by the United States. The forward flash point of a new conflict; the Cold War, was a divided Germany and its former capital Berlin, lying deep in the Soviet zone of occupation.
The European nations which had gone to war in 1939 did not dictate the terms of peace. The Allied strategic aims of the later war years, and the shape of the postwar world, were determined at the great wartime conference by two non-European powers; the United States and the Soviet Union. Soviet hegemony was established in Eastern Europe. In 1954 Poland, the country for which Britain and France had gone to war in 1939, exchanged occupation by the Nazis for a long Soviet tyranny.
In the Pacific the defeat of Japan ensured American domination of the region. The humiliation which the Japanese had inflicted on the colonial powers in the Far East in 1941-42 meant that the empires which the latter had shed so much blood and treasure to regain would soon be threatened by a tide of nationalism.