The History Buff's Guide to World War II (2 page)

Before the eight-month war, Japan was a rising Asian entity, yet its military was unproven. After the war, the formerly isolated archipelago had become an international empire with nearly half its national budget going toward defense.
³

The Japanese Empire launched its inaugural attack in the Sino-Japanese War in the same fashion it would do later in the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War, by failing to precede the offensive with a declaration of war.

2
. SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898)

The Spanish monarchy subjected Cuba, its last imperial jewel, to years of widespread poverty and corruption. By 1895 the Cubans began to fight back. In the United States, farmers expressed widespread support for the agricultural islanders, and investors expressed widespread interest in Cuba’s plantations, mines, and railroads.

Relentless public pressure in the United States induced otherwise isolationist President William McKinley to send the USS
Maine
into Havana Harbor, where it exploded and sank under mysterious circumstances. In short order, the United States declared war on Spain and promptly routed the unmotivated and outdated Spanish navy off the Philippines and Cuba. In defeat, Spain lost its last modest holding in a hemisphere it once dominated. So, too, the United States underwent a transformation.

The U.S. Eighth Army embarks for Cuba in 1898, marking the last days of a once-global Spanish Empire.

In the twenty years before the Spanish-American War, the United States participated in virtually no international armed conflicts nor made territorial acquisitions outside North America, except for gaining exclusive rights in 1887 to a Pacific island port called P
EARL
H
ARBOR
.
⁴

In the twenty years after the declaration of war with Spain, the United States conducted military operations in China, Panama, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, France, and Russia. It also acquired the Hawaiian Islands, Eastern Samoa, Guam, Wake Island, and Puerto Rico; built and controlled the Panama Canal; and claimed stewardship over the seven thousand islands and seven million inhabitants of the Philippines. These forays, however profitable, would later compromise an American desire for isolation.

The Spanish-American War turned a former undersecretary of the navy into a national celebrity: First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry commander Theodore Roosevelt.

3
. RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR (1904–5)

Second-tier world powers Russia and Japan were looking to expand their empires, but their options were limited. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed South America as off-limits. Europe held much of Africa, Australia, South and Southeast Asia, and coastal China. The leftovers appeared to be Korea and the Chinese province of Manchuria. Both Russia and Japan had made inroads to the politically weak region, securing ports, rail lines, and one-sided commercial agreements.

In an attempt to push Russia out, Japan launched a surprise naval attack on Russian-held Port Arthur at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula just west of Korea. Two days later the Japanese declared war.

Japan’s land forces then pushed through Korea, driving northwest toward the key rail junction of Mukden and southwest to link up with its navy surrounding Port Arthur. Fighting lasted for months. The total number of troops deployed by both sides surpassed a million, and total casualties reached hundreds of thousands, but Japan’s short supply lines made for faster reinforcements.

In desperation, Russia launched much of its Baltic fleet, sending it around Europe, Africa, and across the Indian Ocean. The armada sailed for nearly nine months, only to be annihilated by the waiting Japanese navy at the battle of Tsushima Straits. Of eight Russian battleships, eight cruisers, nine destroyers, and a number of smaller ships, all but three vessels were either sunk, captured, or bottled up in neutral ports.

Defeat cost Russia half of sprawling Sakhalin Island, most of southern Manchuria, and all of Korea. Worse, the disillusioned home front exploded with strikes, revolts, sabotage, and political assassinations. Severely discredited, the Romanov dynasty of three centuries would endure only twelve more years.

Japanese artillery fires on Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War.

In Japan, patriotism boomed. Never before had an East Asian nation defeated a European power. But the price of victory nearly exhausted the island country. Public and military officials alike developed a heightened awareness of their limited resources, and Japan expanded its Asian sphere of influence accordingly.

The Russo-Japanese conflict also offered a daunting picture of warfare in the new century. Fighting saw wide use of torpedo boats, searchlights, rockets, modern battleships, and machine guns.

The May 1905 battle of Tsushima Straits involved almost one hundred ships yet lasted less than an hour. An imperial flag aloft one of the Japanese battleships would fly again thirty-six years later—at the mast of the flagship leading the attack on Pearl Harbor.

4
. THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914–18)

By 1914 the collective body of knowledge on weaponry stood ready for a great leap forward. European engineers and industry created limited numbers of armored battleships, reliable machine guns, twin-engine bombers, antipersonnel blistering agents, diesel submarines, rudimentary tanks, and long-range artillery. Perhaps the ferocity of such devices would have remained hidden had imperial egos remained manageable. But no such sobriety reigned among the major kingdoms, and a small demonstration of ethnic unrest in Sarajevo abruptly escalated into a contest dominated by factions and factories.

Sparing the details of the four-year war, a synopsis of its aftermath reads like a doomsday primer. The Poles lost nearly two million buildings, most of their livestock, and one million military and two million civilian casualties. One million Armenians perished in a Turkish-led genocide. Monstrously powerful artillery accounted for seven of ten battlefield deaths, mangling animals and men so badly that governments destroyed much of the photographic evidence for fear of domestic backlash. Fighting obliterated whole areas of northeast France and Belgium, leveled homes, buried factories, and seeded farmlands with tons of unexploded ordnance. At least eight million European children were orphaned.
⁵

It was by all measures the bloodiest war in history, ending the lives of eighteen million people as well as the empires of Russia, the Ottomans, Austria, and Germany. Its lethality also severely wounded the empires of France and Britain and shocked latecomer United States away from foreign entanglements for nearly a generation.

French troops prepare to go over the top. The horror of the Somme and the Marne would scar the French national psyche for decades.

In the last year of the war, Spanish influenza broke out among the combatants, and modern transportation unleashed the virus globally. In eighteen months, the pestilence managed to kill more than twenty million people worldwide. More than half a million Americans perished—ten times the number lost in battle during the war.

5
. RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR (1917–21)

In October 1917 the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin staged a successful coup d’état against the short-lived provisional government. Much of Lenin’s success stemmed from his simple promise of “peace, land, bread.” However, in negotiating peace with Germany during World War I, the Bolsheviks surrendered thousands of square miles of land, much of it rich in grain and mineral deposits. As a result, the price of bread rocketed one thousand percent in a year’s time. In response, peasants, army officers, Cossacks, royalists, and factory workers turned against the Bolshevik (newly dubbed Communist) regime, sending the largest state on earth into civil war.

Fighting erupted from the Baltic to the Pacific and promptly spread to neighboring countries, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, and Poland. Crisscrossing armies leveled villages, burned crops, slaughtered people and animals with equal haste, and confiscated or destroyed scarce food and shelter. The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, exchanged hands sixteen times.
⁶

After more than three years of bloodshed, the poorly armed but well-organized Reds conquered a hopelessly divided opposition. Victory came at the price of an obliterated industrial base, an alienated peasantry, an exhausted army, and widespread famine, but Russia became the first nation-state ever to turn socialist. More important, the Soviet leadership vowed to export its revolution to the rest of the industrialized world.
⁷

Russia suffered 1.7 million dead in the First World War. The following Russian civil war consumed an estimated 7 to 10 million more lives, mostly by way of starvation and disease.

6
. POLISH-SOVIET WAR (1919–21)

Partitioned into nothing during the eighteenth century by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, the country of Poland struggled to piece itself back together after the First World War. Its old borders, only partially reestablished by the Treaty of Versailles, became grounds for bitter international contention. In three years the government of Jozef Pilsudski engaged in six different border wars against Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, western Ukraine, and Soviet Russia. The fight against the last proved to be the longest, deadliest, and most successful.

While the Red Army fought for survival in the Russian civil war, Pilsudski’s armies advanced eastward, aiming to incorporate areas of mixed Polish ethnicity. Their success was remarkable.

Polish troops reached as far as Kiev, three hundred miles east of Warsaw, taking much of Lithuania and Byelorussia in the process. Regrouping, the Red Army counterattacked and nearly entered the Polish capital. In fact, several German and Russian newspapers reported that Warsaw had fallen. Then a miraculous Polish attack upon the southern Soviet flank shattered and dispersed three armies, forcing the weary Reds to concede Polish independence, land, and victory. The seesaw conflict consumed 150,000 Russian and at least 50,000 Polish casualties and imbued hostilities between the two states that would endure for decades.
⁸

Some Westerners credited Poland with halting a Bolshevik tide that may have communized much of politically fragile Europe. Whether such an event was possible, Soviet sentiments were not against it. On November 7, 1920, just before the Red Army conceded defeat, the Soviet daily Pravda declared, “The hour of world victory is near.”
⁹

The Red Army lost three times the number of dead during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 as it lost in the Afghan War of 1980–88.