Archive 1945

How The Economist reported on the final year of the second world war, week by week

In January 1945, 80 years ago, the second world war was entering its seventh year. Fighting raged in Europe, as Allied armies liberated large parts of France and Belgium from Nazi control. The Red Army was pushing from the Soviet Union into Poland, squeezing German forces from the east. Meanwhile the Allies’ campaign in the Pacific was gathering momentum, and America was planning for an invasion of Japan. The outcome of the war would transform the international balance of power, politics and the global economy in ways that still shape the world.

This project is republishing excerpts from The Economist’s archive, week by week as the war rolled to an end—a time capsule of how we reported on its final year. A new instalment will appear here every Friday until August. To be notified about new entries, sign up for The War Room, our weekly defence newsletter. Archive 1945 is also available in German.

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American infantrymen of the 290th Regiment of the US Army fight in fresh snowfall near Amonines, Belgium. The fighting and German counter-offensive on the Belgian-German border later became famous as the Battle of the Bulge

January 3

Deadlock in Europe

By January 6th 1945, when we published our first issue of the year, the conflict in Europe was in its last stages. We wrote that, late in 1944, “it was not only ordinary men and women who said, ‘It will all be over by Christmas.’” But the speed of the Allies’ advance into Nazi-occupied parts of Europe had slowed. Germany’s Rundstedt offensive (now better known as the Battle of the Bulge) had put the Allies on the back foot in Belgium and Luxembourg. The British were still fighting in Greece. Poland’s communists, known as the Lublin Committee, were at loggerheads with the Polish government-in-exile in London over who would control the country.

The mood in Britain was grim. Although the Nazis were still being squeezed on both sides of the continent, The Economist declared “Deadlock in Europe”:

“The year 1945 is opening gloomily for the Allies. Fighting still goes on in Athens. The Lublin Committee has added another twist to the tangled knot of Polish politics by declaring itself the provisional government of Poland. Across the Atlantic, American criticism of Britain and distrust of Russia show but little sign of abating. Militarily, too, the outlook is disappointing. The Rundstedt offensive has been checked, but that it should have succeeded at all grievously contradicts the high hopes of last summer.”

It was not that victory felt distant to Britons—in fact it looked all but assured. But “military deadlock and political disunity” had delayed the Nazis’ defeat. Disagreements over how Germany would be treated after the war were a problem. The Nazis, we wrote, were hoping “that the coalition against them will, after all, collapse”. And a proposal for post-war Germany to cede its industrial heartlands, advanced by France and the Soviet Union, was giving Germans a stronger will to fight on.

Britain had reason to feel glum beyond the battlefield, too. Running a war economy had taken a heavy toll on its people. The Economist had recently received one of the first big releases of statistical data since the beginning of the war (though we explained that “reasons of security still demand that some remain secret until the defeat of both Germany and Japan”). War had transformed the British economy. It wasn’t just that the government had hiked taxes to pay for the war effort. Spending on consumer goods had plummeted, even if fuel and light sold well during the Blitz—as we illustrated in this chart:

“No motor-cars, refrigerators, pianos, vacuum cleaners, tennis or golf balls have been produced since 1942, and only very few radios, bicycles, watches and fountain pens.”

Rumours had swirled in 1944 that Adolf Hitler had died, gone mad or been confined by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS (the Nazis’ main paramilitary group). But Hitler’s New Year address, we wrote, showed that he was “alive, no more insane than usual, and not dramatically imprisoned”:

“His talk was full of the German myth, the rebuilding of bigger and better German towns, the failure of the bourgeois world and the new dawn of National Socialist principles…He appears to have passed beyond even a remote interference in the strategy of the war and to be now little beyond the focus for the despairing nationalism of the German people.”

Still, with the Nazis being pressed by the Allies in the west and the Soviet Union in the east, the dictator’s appeals to nationalism were ringing hollow. Rather, his message smacked of bluster and desperation. ■

January 10

Divided China

While the Allies squeezed the Nazis in Europe, American forces in the Pacific put pressure on Japan. It had bombed Pearl Harbour, a naval base in Hawaii, on December 7th 1941, killing nearly 2,500 people. The next day President Franklin Roosevelt went to war in Asia. As 1945 began, America had checked the expansion of Japan’s empire and was making advances in the Philippines, which had been under Japanese occupation since 1941:

“The landing on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine Islands, has begun. Great American forces have already established four bridgeheads, and although tough fighting lies ahead, there can be no doubt that the last phase in the recapture of the Philippines has begun and that the end is in sight.”

The Economist turned next to China. America had been supporting it against Japan since 1940 with loans and weapons. In 1941 it sent military advisers and established air bases on the mainland. It had a strong interest in helping China end Japan’s occupation—not only to weaken Japan, but to strengthen China as a major power that would help enforce peace in Asia after the war.

This was no easy task. China was then run by a patchwork of rival governments. Outside the areas under Japan’s control, some of the country was led by the Kuomintang, a nationalist group led by Chiang Kai-shek, with a base in Chongqing, in central China; another area was controlled by the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, with a stronghold in Yan’an, a city in the north. Japan’s defeat could cause a situation “of the greatest confusion” in China, we wrote. Though the country’s two rival powers had fought alongside each other against the Japanese, they had also “been for some years in a state of actual or latent civil war”.

The civil wars that had broken out in liberated countries in Europe seemed to augur ill for China:

“In face of this situation—a potential Greece of the Far East, on a vaster and even more damaging scale—what policy ought the allies to pursue? China’s allies suffer from this grave disadvantage, that foreign intervention is always unpopular, and interference, if pressed too far, may end in nothing but violent dislike for those who have done the interfering…It is therefore with the utmost patience and tact that the Allies must press on both sides in China the need for unity.”

But unity, we noted, would be hard. Chiang seemed motivated “more by the desire to maintain and reinforce power than by any wish to share power in some new administration with the Communists”. The Communists were determined “to maintain power in their own areas and spread it where they can”. Though we argued that a government of national unity would be best for China, it was hard to see how it was to be “brought into being”. ■

January 17

The neglected ally

By the beginning of 1945 most of France had been liberated. The previous August, the Allies had wrested Paris from German control and Charles de Gaulle, who had led a provisional government in exile from London and Algiers, returned to the capital. Occupation had taken its toll. On January 20th 1945, The Economist wrote:

“France has been allowed to drift into a position from which it must be speedily rescued. The population of Paris and of many other towns is shivering from lack of coal; during the first week of this month daily deliveries to Paris averaged little more than 10,000 metric tons, a mere fraction of normal requirements and barely enough to meet the urgent need of hospitals, schools and essential public services.”

Bread was rationed at 13 ounces (370g) a day, and cheese at 0.75 ounces (20g) a week. Even then, there was “no guarantee that even these meagre rations can be supplied”.

French industry was in a woeful state, too: “The evil of unemployment—in Paris alone some 400,000 persons are unemployed—has been added to the hardships caused by the lack of heat, food and clothing in the industrial centres of France.” With that came fears of political instability. We warned that there would be “a limit to French patience. And that limit is in sight…Faced with a growing volume of discontent, the government’s position might be weakened.” It was in everyone’s interest that “France should not become the neglected ally.”

France’s port cities had been battered. Boulogne lay in ruins, but Marseille was already sending supplies to the frontline. In Nantes, large crowds welcomed de Gaulle on January 14th.

Video: Getty Images

Britain and America, we argued, should treat France as an equal partner in the war effort, “not only in the formulation of strategy, but also in the allocation of resources”. America, with its abundant natural resources, could boost supplies to France. But Britain should also play its part—even if it “can contribute only pence to America’s pounds”.

Meanwhile a very different picture of liberation was emerging in eastern Europe, where the Nazis had been pushed out by the Soviet Union:

“A complete veil of secrecy has fallen over Russian-occupied Europe. Odd hints and pieces of information point to some political tension here and there, and to some extent armed clashes between Russians and local forces. But secrecy has made it almost impossible to gauge the scope and importance of these disturbances. Whatever its policy in the occupied territories, the Russian Government is not handicapped by the exacting demands of democratic opinion and parliamentary control.”

There did seem to be differences between the governments that formed under Soviet influence. In some countries the communists were in fact not intent on destroying all that remained of the old order. Bulgaria did not depose its king after the communists took power in September 1944; King Michael of Romania even received praise from the country’s communists, who wanted to show moderation (though both countries later became republics: Bulgaria in 1946, and Romania in 1947). In Poland, however, political divisions were much sharper. The Soviet-backed Lublin government wanted to abolish Poland’s 1935 constitution (they would eventually succeed), and fighting broke out between partisans and Russian soldiers.

What policy, we debated, would the Soviet Union choose to pursue in the territories it had helped liberate? On one hand, it might “decide to exercise control in such a manner that the national sovereignty of each small state is seriously impaired”. That would mean “ideological Gleichschaltung”—a term the Nazis used to describe taking total control of society. On the other hand, it might choose to exercise its influence in the region indirectly. In January 1945, it was hard to say which direction the Soviet Union would go in. ■

German infantry, assisted by a Sd.Kfz 234/2 'Puma' tank, carrying out a counter-attack in the Upper Silesia, 26 February 1945

January 24

Germany’s war machine

By late January, the Red Army was pushing through central Europe and advancing steadily towards Berlin, Germany’s capital. Ukraine, which the Nazis had seized in 1941 in order to control its wealth of natural resources, including wheat and iron ore, had been retaken by the Soviet Union in 1944. Meanwhile, in Poland, the Red Army had pushed into the cities of Warsaw and Krakow.

The German-controlled areas farther south were coming under attack, too. One such region was Upper Silesia, now situated mostly in southern Poland. An industrial heartland rich in coal and other commodities, it had become one of the main engines of Germany’s war economy (see the map below that we published in our January 27th issue). It was also the site of some of the Nazis’ largest forced-labour and concentration camps, including those that made up Auschwitz.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, parts of Upper Silesia had been held by imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia. These came under full German control after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The region stretched across 8,000 square miles (21,000 square km) and was home to 4.5m people. “Within this region,” we wrote, “there are the richest coal deposits of the whole Continent”. Upper Silesia’s zinc deposits were also thought to be “the largest in the world”. The region’s coal made it vital for the production of chemicals, as well as electricity: “A dense gas and electricity grid, reaching as far as Breslau, depends on Upper Silesian coal.”

Upper Silesia was an industrial laggard compared with the Ruhr, a region in western Germany best known for producing coal and steel. Upper Silesia’s steel production was small by comparison, partly because it had too few local mines for iron ore. Yet this region had become central to the Nazi war machine, especially after the Allies began bombing the Ruhr heavily in 1943:

“It cannot be doubted, therefore, that during the last two years Upper Silesia has developed numerous new industries. Apart from new chemical plants, large factories for all kinds of war material have sprung up all over the area, usually being situated away from inhabited places and well camouflaged by forests and hills.”

After Allied bombing intensified, the Nazis relocated some of their heavy industry from the Ruhr to Upper Silesia. “There is no doubt,” we wrote, “that the most vital war factories have been built underground.” Everything from cement and fertiliser to trains and railway tracks were being produced there. By 1945, the railways of eastern Germany were dependent on the region’s coal. And so the loss of Upper Silesia, The Economist wrote, “would be a very severe blow to Germany’s war industry”.

It would also mean liberation for thousands of prisoners. On January 27th, the same day as The Economist’s article on Upper Silesia went to press, the Red Army seized control of Auschwitz from the Nazis. This was the Nazis’ biggest concentration camp; more than 1m Jews, Poles, Roma and others were killed there during the Holocaust. As the Red Army’s advance continued, the extent of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in occupied Poland and elsewhere would become clearer still. ■

January 31

Ads in a time of war

The second world war was tough on Britain’s firms. Many of the goods they had sold before the war were no longer being produced, as the country redirected resources to supporting the armed forces. Admen felt this keenly. “Brand goodwill,” wrote the Advertising Association in 1940, “is a capital asset of almost unlimited value: difficult to build; only too easy to lose.” “Let us guard our brand names during this economic upheaval,” it exhorted companies.

Not only did they have fewer products to hawk; they were also up against a vigorous campaign against profligacy. The Squander Bug, a cartoon menace dreamed up by the government who lured shoppers into wasting money rather than investing in war bonds, appeared repeatedly in propaganda. The bug was described as “Hitler’s pal”.

And yet, throughout the war, British brands managed to keep themselves at the front of consumers’ minds. Leafing through the ads we printed early in 1945 reveals a lot about life on the home front. The makers of Bovril, a meat-extract paste that can be brewed into a beefy drink, touted the “warmth and cheeriness” it could offer Britons in the dead of winter. Crookes, a drug company, marketed halibut oil as “an essential of wartime diet”, especially “during this sixth winter of war”.

Ads for the finer stuff appeared in our pages, too—with a twist. Whisky production had collapsed in the early 1940s, as grain supplies were funnelled towards food, before slowly starting up again in 1944. White Horse, a distiller, tried to capitalise on that shift by advertising its stock of “pre-war whisky”, which had been “growing old when this war was young”. An ad for Black Magic (a brand still sold today, now owned by Nestlé) promised that chocolates which had long been out of production would soon be back on sale: “Come Peace, come Black Magic.”

Other firms used their ads to demonstrate their role in the war effort. Daimler and Singer, two carmakers, sought to win over The Economist’s readers by showing off the kit they had provided to secure Britain’s power in the air, on land and by sea. Daimler built armoured vehicles for infantry; both firms made aircraft parts. Kodak, an American company, made cameras for Allied soldiers and bomber teams, who used them to record their position over an enemy target when a bomb was released.

Companies had used ad space in this way since the beginning of the war. But by January 1945, they were looking ahead to its end. Singer promised that the skill of its engineers, “heightened by five years’ devotion to the nation’s cause”, would “turn to the making of the future’s finest cars”. So did Lanchester, another carmaker. “The post-war Lanchester,” it promised, really would turn out to be a car “well worth waiting for”. ■

February

1945

February 7

Conference in the Crimea

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin had last met in Tehran, Iran’s capital, in late 1943. There they had agreed that Britain and America would open a second front against the Nazis in western Europe while the Soviet Union attacked from the east. Now, with German defences crumbling, the leaders of Britain, America and the Soviet Union convened again—in Yalta, a resort town in Crimea. “The world’s triumvirate,” we wrote on February 3rd 1945, “will again meet face to face to determine the last stages of the war and the first steps of the peace.”

Held from February 4th to 11th, the Yalta conference sought to thrash out a plan for how the Allies would govern Europe after the Nazis’ defeat. In Tehran the three powers had settled on having “zones of influence”: Russia would dominate central and eastern Europe and the Balkans, and Britain and America would hold sway in the Mediterranean. But the agreement reached at Yalta, we reported after the conference’s end, revised those plans. The three instead committed themselves to “the right…to all peoples, to choose their own form of government”.

As the aggressor, Germany would be subject to occupation by the Allies in order to prevent the resurgence of Nazism and to ensure the country’s eventual transition to democracy. Control would be split four ways between the three powers and France (although the boundaries of these “zones of occupation” were not finalised: the front lines were still moving, in the east and the west, at the time of the Yalta conference). Germany would also be demilitarised:

“The destruction of German militarism and of the German General Staff appears for the first time beside the annihilation of Nazism. The punishment of war criminals is reaffirmed. For the first time it is officially suggested that the Germans can eventually win ‘a decent life…and a place in the comity of nations.’ The ambiguities concern the economic and territorial settlement.”

But much about the implementation of this plan remained fuzzy, beginning with the demand for Germany to demilitarise. “Interpreted harshly, this could mean the total destruction of German heavy industry,” we wrote. “Leniently understood, it could mean a measure of Allied supervision—admittedly difficult—over a functioning German industrial system.” It was also unclear whether a demand for the country to pay reparations could override “a minimum standard of life for the Germans”. We worried that the declaration could even be used by the occupying powers to justify subjecting Germans to forced labour as a form of restitution.

And so The Economist reserved judgment on what had been achieved at Yalta: “No verdict can be passed on the terms as they stand. The interpretation is all.” In the end, America and Britain, which favoured a more lenient policy, would come to blows with the Soviet Union over its heavy-handed expropriation of German factories, and its refusal to send food from the country’s east to its more populous west. Tensions over the handling of occupied Germany would go on to shape the early years of the cold war.

In the years after Yalta, the West would also end up sharply divided with the Soviet Union over how to treat eastern Europe. The declaration did not spell this out. The Allies agreed that Poland would “be reorganised on a broader democratic basis, with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad”. After years of war, that seemed a fair outcome for Poland—if only it could be realised:

“Everything turns on the interpretation given in practice to such terms as ‘democratic,’ ‘free and unfettered elections,’ ‘democratic and non-Nazi parties,’ ‘not compromised by collaboration with the enemy.’ If these words mean what they say, and what British and Americans understand them to mean, then clearly a great advance has been made. To this only the execution of these plans can give a final answer…There is, however, one sure test. If the governments established under the Crimea Declaration and the communities they administer show healthy signs of dispute, differences of opinion, and genuine independence of political approach, it will be safe to say ‘Amen’ to the present proposals.”

The Yalta declaration would miserably fail to meet The Economist’s test. Stalin did not keep his promise to allow free elections in central and eastern Europe; with the Red Army controlling much of the region, there was little America and Britain could do to force him. In Poland, even as the leaders met in Yalta, Soviet forces began to crush opposition to communist rule. ■

February 14

The German rump

While Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were huddled at Yalta, the Soviet Union’s offensive in eastern Europe was moving at breakneck speed. On January 12th the Red Army had begun its charge through Poland towards Germany. By the middle of February, the Allies had “reduced Germany to its heartland between the Rhine and the Oder”, two rivers in the west and east. Whereas the Nazis had been able to slow the Allies in the west, the Red Army was much harder to stop. We explained:

“First of all, the Russian armies are decidedly superior in numbers. Once the break-through was achieved, the speed of the advance was accelerated by the dense network of roads. The rivers, lakes and swamps, common to eastern Germany and western Poland, were therefore no obstacle. Under these conditions, a mere stabilisation of the fighting on a new front along the Oder line cannot be more than a temporary halt, if it can be achieved at all.”

In other words, ever more of Germany, we predicted, would soon succumb to Soviet occupation. The area that remained under Nazi control was still big, stretching from the north-west Balkans and northern Italy to Norway, where a collaborationist regime was still in power. But, crucially, the Soviet offensive had dealt a heavy blow to the supply chains that kept Germany fighting.

By mid-February the Red Army controlled nearly all of Upper Silesia, an industrial region that was critical for Germany’s supply of coal and metals. Over the previous few weeks that loss had hit the Nazis’ war industry, and especially their armament factories. “Compared with production in Great Britain and the United States,” we reported, “Germany’s present output seems small and totally inadequate for replacing the losses and for equipping huge armies.” That did not necessarily doom the Nazis; as we noted, Germany had never kept up with Britain and America in the number of bomber planes it could manufacture, for example. But now it was building hardly any ships, apart from submarines and small boats.

With the loss of Poland, the Nazis had also relinquished farmland that produced huge amounts of staple foods. Some supplies were abandoned during the retreat. “Large stocks of potatoes must have been left behind,” we wrote. Efficient distribution networks were “thrown out of gear” as German towns received “a sudden influx of evacuees” and railways became “overburdened with military transport”. As a result, rationing was tightened: “The food cards, originally issued for the eight weeks’ period from February 5th to April 1st, will have to last for nine weeks, which means a reduction [in rations] of roughly 10 per cent.”

Nazi propaganda was growing increasingly desperate. The Volkssturm, a militia formed by Hitler in late 1944 to mount a final defence of Germany, featured heavily in the regime’s messaging. But morale among the group’s 1m men was miserable. Poorly equipped and mostly untrained, few were moved by appeals to Nazi fanaticism. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the German army was scrambling to regroup after being driven from France and Poland:

“Behind this propaganda, which has never before used so many superlatives in describing the plight of refugees and the danger to the Reich, the reorganisation of the armies is undoubtedly progressing. Political opposition from generals and other officers, which provided the danger-point last summer, seems to be absent; in fact, after the purge of last year, effective opposition hardly seems likely at the moment. So far, the Allies’ policy of unconditional surrender appears to have resulted in an ‘Unconditional Defence.’”

And “Unconditional Defence”, as The Economist put it, was enforced brutally by the Nazis. Germans who showed signs of defeatism were punished harshly; large numbers of deserters were shot. For many Germans, it had been clear for months that the war was lost. ■

Fourth Marines Hit Iwo Jima Beach -- Fourth Marines dash from landing craft, dragging equipment, while others Go Over The Top of sand dune as they hit the beach of Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, February 19. Smoke of artillery of Mortar fire in background. February 22, 1945. (Photo by Joe Rosenthal, AP).

February 21

Trouble in Tokyo

In the Pacific, by mid-February, the tide was turning in favour of America. “Manila, capital of the Philippines, has fallen within four weeks of the first American landings on the Lingayen beaches,” we wrote on February 10th. Before long, America would defeat the remaining Japanese forces on the islands, which they had occupied since 1941. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who led the American fleet in the Pacific, planned to use Manila as the main base for further naval operations against Japan. “We shall continue to move in the direction of Japan,” he said, “and we are optimistic of our ability to do this.” And indeed, by February 24th, Japan was in disarray:

“These are black weeks for the leaders and people of Japan. The Philippines are all but lost. American forces are landing on Iwojima, only six hundred miles from the coasts of Japan. Tokyo and other towns have received the first of what promises to be a continuous series of bombing raids from over a thousand American aircraft. At the same time, the news from Europe—the Crimea Conference and the sweeping Russian advances into Germany—suggests that the Allies may soon be free to concentrate all their resources against Japan.”

The assault on Iwo Jima (pictured), a strategically vital island that America would use to support bombing raids on the Japanese mainland, was only the latest in a series of American advances. Over the past two and a half years, America’s victories in the Pacific had precipitated high political drama in Japan. In the summer of 1944 General Tojo Hideki had been forced to resign as prime minister, after a string of defeats. His successor, General Koiso Kuniaki, was also struggling to improve Japan’s military fortunes. Though the Japanese press had aired serious complaints about the poor quality of the country’s aircraft, Koiso had failed to boost its war machine (within weeks of Manila’s fall, he too would resign, as America invaded Okinawa in April 1945).

The loss of the Philippines had laid bare Japan’s weaknesses. We noted that industrial shortages (probably including rubber and oil from South-East Asia) had become a big problem. “It is easy to see,” we wrote, “that in this situation it would need a great deal of optimism in Japan to-day to feel that there is still any chance of victory.”

Would the country lay down its arms or choose to fight to the end, as Germany was doing? A comparison to Italy seemed apt. There, a strong monarchy and relatively weak popular support for fascism meant that Italy surrendered soon after it began suffering big military defeats: the newly installed prime minister, Pietro Badoglio, did so in September 1943. (The king, Victor Emmanuel, had arrested Benito Mussolini, the country’s fascist dictator who was Badoglio’s predecessor, earlier that year.) The same factors were present in Japan: with the emperor still in charge and no mass movement in support of fascism, Japan might similarly be expected to give up. To force the country to accept “a fight to the finish,” we reasoned, “probably needs the backing of a mass party which so far the extremists have failed to create.” But there was a hitch:

“There is thus a certain amount of evidence to support the view that as the prospects of defeat grow more certain, the chance will increase of a change of regime in Japan bringing in the Japanese Badoglio, ready not to negotiate but to accept unconditional surrender. But it would be very rash to dogmatise, and there are other factors and forces that tell a different story. The centre of extremism in Japan is the Army and at every decisive turn in Japanese policy since 1931 the military leaders have had most of their own way. It is also true that their own way has hitherto been crowned with quick success.”

Faced with the possibility of a full-blown American assault, it seemed possible that Japan’s army would try to radicalise the country’s young nationalists and purge the moderates that remained in the government and at the Emperor’s court. “On such a base,” The Economist feared, “they could, perhaps, emulate the Nazis and build a regime tough enough to fight to the bitter end.”

Whether they would succeed in convincing Japan was not clear; some moderates, we wrote, still seemed to have the upper hand. Still, the thought of “a fight to the finish on the soil of Japan itself” was a chilling prospect: after all, the battle for Iwo Jima remains one of the bloodiest ever fought by America’s marines. As they became bogged down in vicious fighting on the heavily fortified island, Iwo Jima would show how catastrophic a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland could be. ■

February 28

Oh I would like to be beside the seaside!

While some of the bloodiest battles between America and Japan in the Pacific were only just beginning, for Britons victory in Europe felt close enough that The Economist allowed itself to look ahead to the end of the war. Life would not return to normal quickly. Britain’s economy had been pummelled, forcing the government to keep some rationing in place until as late as 1954. But it was obvious that, once the fighting stopped, pent-up desire for rest and relaxation would be strong:

“No one now believes that the ‘last all clear’ will herald an immediate resumption of pre-war life with its abundance of good things. The continuance of rationing, with only gradual relaxation, is accepted as inevitable. Nonetheless, the armistice with Germany will release a flow of spending—however much discouraged officially—which will pour through every gap not closed by definite per caput rationing. The end of the war will break the mould in which the social conscience has been set for the last five years. Few will give a second thought to saving fuel or money, making do and mending, or taking journeys which on any definition are not ‘really necessary.’”

It seemed only natural that Britons would crave “the first holiday since the last days of peace”. The government had long urged them to spend “holidays at home”; now it was no longer discouraging them from relaxing outside it. “Reunited families, demobilised ex-servicemen on paid leave, workers on holidays with pay, newly married couples, families of children who have never seen the sea, and others who have forgone wartime holidays” were just some of the groups that we expected would soon flock to British resorts, including Margate, Brighton and Eastbourne.

Children would return to beaches with their buckets and spades in the summer of 1945. In this video from July, barbed wire still stretches across the railings of a seafront promenade.

Video: British Movietone/AP

But it wasn’t clear the seaside resorts would be up to it. After years of sitting closed for naval-security reasons, it was easy to imagine “endless queues for meals and beds”. In 1944, when some resorts re-opened, they struggled to cope even with smaller crowds:

“The catering industries’ need for Government assistance is a matter of urgency. The lifting last year of the defence area ban on travellers resulted in an influx of visitors to East and South-East coast resorts which they were ill-prepared to receive and with which the railways could not cope. This year the number of holiday-makers is likely to be considerably larger, in view of the mood engendered by the military situation. People are now prepared to permit themselves some relaxation of effort. If the Armistice should come before the main holiday season, the demand for holidays will be heightened. The immediate prospect is one of an acute shortage of holiday accommodation.”

There were a few ways in which the government might try to help, The Economist noted. Some had floated the idea of state-run holiday camps—though this, we wrote, “mercifully, would be destined for unpopularity”. Better options, we thought, would be for the government to open up old army camps and industrial workers’ hostels to big groups, and to offer special loans to businesses that wanted to cater to holidaymakers. After years of anxiety over the country’s supply of guns and butter, worrying about ice cream and parasols must have felt like a relief. ■

March

1945

March 7

One more river

In western Europe, the Allies had suffered a tough start to the year. After advancing through Nazi-occupied France for most of late 1944, the Americans and the British had got bogged down. In mid-December Gerd von Rundstedt, a German general, had launched a counter-offensive in the Ardennes, between Luxembourg and Belgium. But by February the Allies had routed Rundstedt, whose forces were running out of supplies; and by March they were again pushing into German-held territory from the west.

“At last the Allies stand upon the Rhine, and tomorrow they may be across it,” we wrote hopefully in our issue of March 10th. There was just one more big river for them to cross before they reached the German heartland:

“The first week of March saw battles on the Rhine and the Oder which opened the final chapter of the European war. The Allied armies in the west are reaching the Rhine on a long front, from Coblenz to the Dutch frontier. Rundstedt, hopelessly outfought, has not even been able to keep the big towns on the left bank of the Rhine as bridgeheads for the Wehrmacht...His real objective can only be to delay the establishment of Allied bridgeheads across the Rhine for as long as possible. Even some success in this would bring no real relief to Germany.”

Over to the east, the Red Army, commanded by Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, had made it north to the Polish coast and cut off German forces around the port-city of Danzig (now Gdansk). Like the Allies massed on the Rhine in the west, the Red Army now faced the task of crossing the lower parts of the Oder, which flows north through eastern Germany to the Baltic Sea. Soon the Red Army would launch an assault on Stettin (now Szczecin), a city at the river’s mouth. “The next few weeks”, we reported, “are thus certain to see the last two great battles for river crossings in the German war.”

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, America was intensifying its bombing campaign in Japan. America had been bombing the Japanese mainland since 1942, but stepped up its campaign in 1944—first using air bases on mainland China and later from Saipan, an island that it captured from Japan that summer. Early strikes were targeted at military and industrial sites. But after difficult weather conditions caused a series of raids to fail, American generals abandoned that strategy. In January, Curtis LeMay took charge of operations and ordered firebombing raids on the cities of mainland Japan.

Most structures in Japanese cities, built from wood and paper, stood no chance against the firebombings. On the night of March 9th LeMay launched a massive raid on Tokyo. Close to 300 B-29 bombers dropped white phosphorus and napalm on the city, where it had hardly rained in weeks. That caused a firestorm. More than 100,000 inhabitants were killed and around 40 square kilometres of the city were ravaged. It was the deadliest bombing raid of the entire second world war. As the fighting in Europe entered its final stretch, the conflict in the Pacific was entering its most violent. ■

March 14

Balkan Turmoil

In March 1945 the Nazis were being squeezed from both east and west by the Allies. They were also under growing pressure from the south. The Balkans had been under German occupation for nearly four years. But in 1944 the balance of power shifted. The Red Army pushed south into the Balkans that summer, after storming westwards across Ukraine. Once there it joined forces with resistance fighters led by Josip Broz, a Croat communist who went by the party name “Tito”. With most of the peninsula liberated by the beginning of 1945, Tito met British and Soviet brass to plan the next stages of the campaign. As we reported on March 10th:

“Towards the end of February, Field-Marshal Alexander visited Jugoslavia and conferred with General Tolbukhin, the Soviet Commander-in-Chief in the Balkans, and with Marshal Tito. Presumably, they discussed ways and means to complete the liberation of the Balkans. Nearly the whole South-East of Europe has now been freed, though scattered pockets of German resistance exist throughout Jugoslavia. The Wehrmacht, however, still holds the whole of Croatia as well as the area between Lake Balaton and the Danube in north-western Hungary. These two strongholds cover the approaches to Austria.”

The liberation of most of Yugoslavia—the state that covered much of the western Balkans—and all of Romania had given the Red Army a route through Hungary to Austria. It would lay siege to Vienna in early April. But as the war drew to a close, the Allies’ success in driving the Nazis out of the Balkans was overshadowed by the political, ethnic and territorial conflicts bubbling up within the region itself:

“The political situation in the Balkans and in the Danube Basin is far less satisfactory than the military position. Uneasiness and tension prevail throughout the area. The freed peoples are suffering under two old and familiar scourges: the violence of social and political conflicts and the intensity of an infinite number of nationalistic feuds. Both the internal upheavals and the national conflicts are in one way or another linked with the relations between the great Allied Powers. The old and familiar Balkan problems are reappearing in a form that is only partly new; and they threaten to create international trouble.”

The governments formed after the Nazis’ withdrawal had proven unstable. In Romania, King Michael’s efforts to keep a non-communist government together failed for the third time in March, when Petru Groza, the leader of the left-wing Ploughmen’s Union, formed a new administration—with Russian support. (Andrey Vyshinsky, a Russian diplomat in Bucharest, “may perhaps be regarded as its midwife”, we wrote.) In Yugoslavia Tito, who had just won the support of the Serbian Democratic Party, was struggling to balance his support among Croats, Slovenes and other ethnic groups. Greece, which had erupted in civil war shortly after liberation, had settled into a truce. But sharp divisions between monarchists, communists and moderate republicans meant peace was destined to be short-lived.

Conflicts threatened to break out across borders, too. “The nationalist moods in the Balkans have been reflected in the long list of territorial claims that have already been put on record by nearly all the Balkan governments,” we wrote. In Greece we noted that chauvinistic demonstrations for a “Greater Greece” were growing, with crowds chanting: “Occupy Bulgaria for 55 years” and “Sofia! Sofia!” At the same time, many Greeks feared that Turkey might try to claim some of the Dodecanese Islands close to its coast. Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania were considering territorial claims of their own, too.

The proliferation of disputes both internal and external was worrying:

“The disturbing feature of this typically Balkan turmoil is that the local leaders, generals and chieftains apparently hope that they may be able to exploit possible rivalries between the Great Allied Powers in order to further their own claims. Almost automatically a situation has arisen in which the Left, on the whole, looks for assistance to Russia and the Right places its hopes on the intervention of the Western Powers. Vague political calculations are based on the most grotesque assumptions…It is idle to deny that the policies of the Great Powers on the spot sometimes lend colour to such interpretations.”

Brutal punishments for members of collaborationist regimes, communist smears of Western sympathisers as “fascists” and the emerging cold-war divide between pro-Russian elements and British and American officials were creating a dark, paranoid atmosphere in the Balkans. “The local Governments, parties and factions ought to be told quite bluntly that their hopes of benefiting from inter-Allied rivalry are futile,” we urged. Although in Greece civil war would boil up again in 1946, the worst ethnic wars that we feared did not break out in the 1940s. But, as much of the Balkans slid behind the iron curtain, the peninsula would end up divided by the cold war instead. ■

March 21

Russian Reconstruction

“It is not easy”, The Economist wrote on March 24th, “to give a picture of the Russian economy in the fourth year of the Russo-German war.” Since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the Kremlin had been forced into a desperate fight for survival. Some of the most violent fighting of the second world war took place on the eastern front: the Soviet Union lost more citizens than all the other Allies combined. Now Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, faced the enormous task of rebuilding destroyed towns, cities and industries. With Soviet troops within striking distance of Berlin, we looked at the problems facing the Russian economy and its capacity to recover.

The western regions of the Soviet Union, which were the site of heavy fighting as they were liberated from Nazi control, had experienced untold destruction. We wrote:

“Behind the fighting lines of the Russian armies there lie vast expanses of ‘scorched earth.’ That the destruction wrought there has been on a stupendous scale is certain, although that scale varies from province to province and from town to town. A tentative official estimate puts the area of total destruction at 700 square miles. From scores of cities and towns in the Ukraine and White Russia come reports of life shattered to its very foundations. In many towns, out of thousands of houses only a few dozen or a few hundred were left standing after the Germans had been expelled.”

Big, industrial cities in eastern Ukraine had suffered some of the worst devastation. One-third of the buildings in Kharkiv had been completely destroyed; four-fifths of those that remained were in need of serious repair. The situation across the region was similar. “A high proportion of the urban and rural population”, we wrote, “has been forced back into quasi-troglodyte conditions.” Caves and mud huts had become ordinary dwellings. Mines that were flooded by the Nazis as they fled were still inundated with water; the Soviet authorities had been able to drain only 7.5% of those in the Donbas after they retook the territory.

The state of the economy varied across the vast sweep of the Soviet Union, however. We explained:

“But the story of destruction, which can be continued indefinitely, tells only half the tale. The other half, which is not less striking, has been told by the reports on the industrial development and expansion that have taken place in eastern Russia during the war, as the combined result of the transfer of plant from the west and of an intensive accumulation of capital on the spot. Recently published figures and statements suggest that the rate of development in the east has been so great that it has enabled Russia’s heavy industries to re-capture their pre-war levels of production, and even rise to above them.”

Industrial production in the east, especially in the region around the Ural mountains and in Central Asia, had boomed. Figures for the production of steel—a primary input for weapons, transport and agricultural equipment—gave a sense of Soviet industry’s stunning growth: around 30% more high-grade steel was being produced by 1944 than in 1940. Electricity generation had boomed, too. The Soviet Union’s ability to substitute lost capacity in areas under occupation by expanding industry in the east played a big role in helping it to defeat the Nazis:

“By hard labour and unparalleled sacrifices Russia has thus succeeded in winning the war, not only militarily on the battlefields, but also economically, in the factories and mines. In spite of the tremendous devastation in the western lands, it can now find the basis for post-war reconstruction in its newly-built factories in the east.”

Reconstruction in the liberated territories of the western Soviet Union would lead to a slight slowdown in production in the east. “Even now”, we wrote, “there are signs that the liberation of western industrial areas has already caused some relaxation in the war effort of the eastern provinces.” But the Soviet Union was determined to maintain its industrial growth, including by pressing Germany for reparations to help finance its reconstruction. Stalin was determined that the Soviet Union should assert itself as a global power. Keeping up its wartime economic expansion would be key to that objective. ■

March 28

Battle of Germany

By late March the Allies were closing in on the German heartland. In the west their armies had stood for weeks along the Rhine, the last big river between them and the cities of western Germany. The Nazis had destroyed most of the bridges across the river as they retreated, hoping to slow the Allies’ advance. Some small groups of soldiers crossed the river in early March. Then, on the night of March 23rd, the Allies piled into boats and tanks fitted with flotation aids and crossed the river along a 20km front. Operation Plunder had begun. Within days the Allies had erected bridges across the Rhine and stormed towards Frankfurt and Münster. As we wrote in our edition of March 31st:

“The crossing of the Rhine by the Allies will rank for ever among the most decisive and certainly the most skilfully conducted battles in history. Artillery barrages, air-bombing, parachute landings, all played their meticulously timed parts and the engineers did prodigies in throwing bridges across a wide and swift river under heavy fire. All along the river, from Wesel to Strasbourg, bridgeheads sprang into being in quick, kaleidoscopic succession, and were linked up at great speed into continuous fronts. Across the river the crust of German resistance has been found to be thin and cracked.”

The Allies’ advance devastated the Germans. More than 250,000 soldiers fighting with the Wehrmacht had been captured as the Allies moved beyond the Rhine, we reported. That would make it hard for Albert Kesselring, the general commanding Germany’s forces on the western front, to mount a serious defence without falling back towards the capital. “The ring of concentric defences around Berlin”, we wrote, “may perhaps be the last battlefield chosen by the German Command. There they may still hope to prolong the twilight of the gods in the ruins of the German capital and to impose on the attackers all the handicaps of long communication lines over enemy land submerged in terrible chaos.”

Still, with the Red Army massed along the Oder in north-eastern Germany and surging towards Nazi-occupied Vienna to the south, the Wehrmacht was on the brink of collapse. “The day is not far off”, we wrote, “when the distinction between eastern and western fronts must become meaningless.” In Germany any remaining semblance of order appeared to be unravelling. The “rump of the Reich” that remained under Nazi control was descending into panic:

“The complete paralysis of transport; the scanty industrial resources of Central Germany, Austria and Western Bohemia, which are all that remain to the Wehrmacht; the appalling condition of the bombed towns; the growing administrative chaos—these things can no longer be passed over in silence by official Nazi spokesmen. Frequent announcements about executions of ‘cowards’ and broadcast appeals to Nazi organisations, and even to civilians, for help in the rounding-up of straggling soldiers and deserters are unfailing pointers to a rapid deterioration in morale. In the last war, it was the home front which, according to the Nazi legend, stabbed the Army in the back. In this war, it looks to the Nazis as if the home front had been stabbed in the back by the Army.”

By late March, we wrote, refugees from the territories liberated by the Red Army in the east were fleeing towards central Germany only to meet with others who had been evacuated from Allied-held areas in the west. Nazi propagandists were desperately trying to “shake the stunned nation by a violent propaganda campaign about the apocalyptic consequences of defeat”. Even as the inevitable end drew nearer, the regime’s mouthpieces were delivering a final appeal to national pride “into the ears of the numbed and mutilated German nation”. ■

April

1945

April 4

War and Peace

“The last hour of the Third Reich has struck,” declared The Economist on April 7th. After the Allies established themselves on the east bank of the Rhine at the end of March, British and American tanks and infantry struck “into the very heart of Germany”. The Red Army was also advancing from the east. But as the Nazis’ defeat drew near, the divisions between the Allies were growing increasingly plain:

“The military tasks of the alliance are nearly fulfilled, at least in Europe, but the tasks of peacemaking for the most part still lie ahead. They are certain to put Allied diplomacy to a test much more severe than any of the strains of war. Victory over the common enemy inevitably tends to loosen the ties of solidarity that bind allies in the face of mortal danger. On the eve of victory, and even more on the morrow, differences of outlook and interest reassert themselves.”

Some points of disagreement were already apparent. Among them was the structure of what would later become the United Nations. In 1943 the Allies had agreed to establish a successor to the League of Nations. The following year diplomats from America, Britain, China and the Soviet Union had gathered at Dumbarton Oaks, a mansion in Washington, DC, to come up with proposals for how the organisation would be run. Now delegates from nearly 50 Allied countries were preparing to meet in San Francisco to finalise their plans for the new League.

The Soviet Union’s demands, however, were causing friction with America. As well as taking one seat for the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin wanted two of its constituent republics, Ukraine and Belarus, to have seats too, giving him more power in the assembly. Stalin also wanted Poland to be represented by the communist government in Warsaw, rather than the government in exile supported by America and Britain. Russia’s attitude to international relations, we wrote, seemed to be principally about consolidating power for itself. We wrote:

“In the light of these and similar statements, there can be no doubt about the reluctance with which Russia seems to be joining the world organisation. There is, in fact, an anti-League complex colouring the Russian attitude, which has its origin in Russia’s experience with the old League of Nations. Moscow has not forgotten that Russia was the only state against which the most humiliating sanction—expulsion from the League—was applied in Geneva, when so many flagrant aggressions had been treated with mild indulgence. With this Genevan humiliation still freshly in mind, Russia, now victorious and sought-after, is showing an exaggerated anxiety to make her prestige felt at San Francisco.”

The Soviet Union—still aggrieved by its ejection from the League in 1939 over its invasion of Finland—wanted to be sure that the new organisation would not be able to “put her in the dock” again. “This determination to stop up every possible loophole for attacks on Russia”, we observed, “is certainly not a sign of great moral strength.” But it also presented the Allies with a bigger problem. As we explained:

“To those who have followed Russian policy, this attitude is a disappointment perhaps, but not a surprise. But unfortunately there has been an official conspiracy, born more of wishful thinking than of the desire to deceive, to pretend that all was going smoothly with the plans for a new, and better, League. This has been particularly so in the United States. The American people, with their tendency to attach magical properties to paper constitutions, would, in any event, have been predisposed to exaggerate the importance of the formal organisation of world order. But they have also recently been subjected to a high-pressure campaign by the State Department to ‘sell’ the Dumbarton Oaks proposals.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s administration had pitched the founding of the new organisation as “the greatest hope for continuing peace and as a discharge of the largest part of America’s responsibility to the world”. Now Russia’s demands looked as though they could disrupt the establishment of a successor to the League.

Some, we wrote, had called for the conference at San Francisco to be postponed. But doing so would be humiliating for the Roosevelt administration. The conference, which would run from the end of April until the end of June, would eventually bring the United Nations into being. But it would do so in spite of the fact that “Russian and American views of how to secure peace in the world are radically different”. ■

April 11

Two Presidents

Franklin Roosevelt’s ill health didn’t hold him back. He became president in 1933, 12 years after polio left him paralysed from the waist down. After he took office his health held up for a decade. But leading America through the war took its toll.

In 1943 those close to Roosevelt said he was becoming tired; in February 1945, at the Yalta conference, his doctor told the president's daughter, Anna, that her father had “a serious ticker situation”. In March Roosevelt headed to Warm Springs, his retreat in Georgia, to rest. On April 12th, as he sat for a portrait, he collapsed. He was 63 years old. The Economist reported in its issue of April 21st:

“It would be difficult to find hyperbole strong enough to exaggerate the sense of loss felt all over the free world at the sudden news of President Roosevelt’s death. Never before for a statesman of another country and rarely for one of our own leaders have the outward pomp of ceremonial mourning and also the inward and personal lamentation of the public been more universal and heartfelt. In part, this has been a tribute of gratitude to one who was a very present help in trouble. No Englishman who lived through those twelve dreadful months from June 1940 to June 1941 is ever likely to forget how completely the nation’s hope for ultimate victory rested on that buoyant figure in the White House, and how, stage by stage, the hopes found response in action.”

Roosevelt’s death evoked the same feelings of grief as the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. “Mr Roosevelt had not been in the White House for 63 years,” we wrote, “but it costs an effort of memory to set the mind back to the time of President Hoover.”

After the outbreak of the second world war Roosevelt had convened a special session of Congress to provide arms to Britain and France. Then, in 1941, he secured the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, a military-aid scheme, despite opposition from isolationists. “Now that he is gone, one of the few elements of assurance in an uncertain world has gone with him.” A “master pilot”, Roosevelt had been an expert at leading America through crises:

“It was no accident that found him taking office on the very day the banks closed, or that found him steadily leading the nation to a firm view of its obligations in a world crisis. Friends of the Roosevelt family relate that in the early 1920s, when he had first been ignominiously defeated in his Vice-Presidential candidacy and then been stricken with infantile paralysis, when nothing seemed to be in front of him but the life of an invalid country gentleman, that even then, from his wheel-chair, he prophesied that another great crisis was coming for America and the world, a crisis that could be surmounted only by a strong President pursuing a firm liberal policy, and that he, Franklin Roosevelt the cripple, was to be the man.”

His death meant that the job of president would pass to Harry Truman, whom Roosevelt had chosen as his running-mate in the election of 1944. Truman had been vice-president for less than 90 days. Two and a half hours after Roosevelt died, he was sworn in as president in the Oval Office. “Boys,” he said to a throng of reporters after he became president, “if you ever pray, pray for me now.” The former senator from Missouri was hardly known outside America:

“The eyes of the world are now on President Truman. By one of those extraordinary accidents that can happen only in America, there succeeds to the world’s best-known man one of the world’s least-known men. Although, as has been said, only a single heart-beat separates every Vice-President from the greatest office in the world, his qualifications for holding that office rarely, if ever, enter into the reasons the nominating convention has for its choice. Vice-Presidents are chosen as political makeweights to collect a few votes or (more often) to avoid losing them, and they are almost always obscure figures when they are suddenly thrust into the limelight.”

Feelings of apprehension over Truman’s accession to the presidency reflected the stability and strength that Roosevelt had conveyed, rather than any judgment of the new president’s qualities. One reassuring sign was that James Byrnes, who took charge of war mobilisation under Roosevelt, would continue his central role in American foreign policy. (Truman would pick him as secretary of state in July.) Truman, we wrote, could be expected to be “a good ordinary President”. But after 12 years during which Roosevelt had transformed America and its role in the world, that transition would come as a shock. ■

April 18

Russia and Japan

As the end of the war in Europe drew near, the positions of the major powers in the Pacific theatre were shifting. The Soviet Union, though fighting alongside the Allies against the Nazis in Europe, had held back from getting involved in the war against Japan. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, had negotiated a neutrality pact with Japan in April 1941. The deal prevented a war between the two even after Germany, Japan’s ally, invaded the Soviet Union later that year.

With Germany all but defeated, however, the Soviet Union would soon have a free hand in the east. On April 5th 1945 Molotov poured scorn upon the pact, citing Japanese support for the Nazis, and seemed to suggest that Russia was no longer bound to neutrality. “Russia”, The Economist wrote on April 14th, “is emerging from her enforced passivity in the Far East and assuming a more active role.” The Soviet Union’s strategy would be determined by what it stood to gain from joining forces with the Allies in the Pacific:

“What are the practical considerations? Generally speaking, war—like peace—tends to be indivisible. The ties of Russia’s alliance with the United States and Great Britain are too manifold and many-sided to allow for her continued neutrality. It is difficult to conceive a situation in which the Big Three should jointly shape a post-war European settlement and discard the partnership at the boundaries of Asia…Russia’s own interests would not permit a division of spheres so eccentric as to deprive her of the benefits which she can expect from the alliance in the Pacific theatre of war.”

The Soviet Union’s position in the east had been “reduced almost to insignificance” in the years before Germany invaded the bloc. But the Russian desire for power in the Pacific ran deep. For more than a century before the communist revolution in 1917, the tsars had striven for power in the region. Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, was of a similar bent. “Marshal Stalin’s desire”, we wrote, “to win back for Russia the influence and position lost by the Czars is very likely to assert itself in the Far East with the same vigour and determination as in Europe.”

Russia, which had lost a war to Japan in 1905, stood to regain territory from its old enemy (see map). The southern half of Sakhalin—divided by the Treaty of Portsmouth that year—was one potential prize; a railway link between Vladivostok and Siberia, sold to Japan in 1935, was another. But wartime politics in Asia were complicated. While the Allies might band together to defeat Japan, a long battle in the parts of China and Korea that Japan still controlled threatened to strain relations between the “Big Three”:

“It is obviously in the Allied interest to speed up the end of the Pacific war. The German example shows that the enemy’s harakiri does not make matters easier for the victorious Allies but more difficult. It leaves a legacy of economic chaos and social unsettlement, a very shaky ground for any peace settlement. A Japanese fight to the bitter end, without any central Government being ready to capitulate, might well mean that, even after the conquest of the islands, the war would still go on in Manchuria, Korea and China. This, in its turn, might create grave political problems in China, where the Russians would work through the Communist administration of Yenan, while the Americans and probably also the British would support Chungking. A dangerous inter-Allied rivalry, of which Europe has already seen some examples, may develop also in Asia.”

If the Allies became seriously divided over China—where Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists (headquartered in Chongqing, then known as Chungking) had entered an uneasy truce with Mao Zedong’s Communists to fight Japan—that could “overshadow the peace settlement in Europe”. And Japan appeared to show little sign that it was willing to surrender. To the imperial government the loss of Okinawa, on which the Americans had landed in April, “may look no worse than the occupation of the Channel Islands looked to the British in 1940”. The fighting in the Pacific showed little sign of abating. The Soviets had plenty of time to plan their entry in the east. ■

April 25

Gangsters’ End

By April 20th Berlin was under siege. After Vienna fell to the Red Army a week earlier, the Soviet Union’s generals were able to turn their focus to the German capital. Warplanes laid waste to the city as 1.5m soldiers stormed through the rubble. The Red Army’s artillerymen fired nearly 2m shells during the attack. By May 2nd the last German troops in Berlin had surrendered.

This was all but the end for the Nazis and their allies in Europe. Benito Mussolini had been placed in charge of a Nazi puppet state in northern Italy in 1943, after the king deposed him. In April 1945 the former dictator’s fief was stormed by the Allies; on the 28th he was killed by partisans. Two days later Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker in Berlin. As the dust settled over the city, rumours about his demise swirled. But it was certain that the Nazi regime was finished, 12 years after Hitler had come to power. On May 5th The Economist wrote:

“Mussolini is dead. So, according to general belief, is Hitler, though the world has not yet been given the spectacle of his corpse being kicked around the streets as proof of death. Whether he has really cheated justice, or is merely trying to escape it; whether he has met a soldier’s death or the gibbering dissolution of a lunatic; whether he died of natural causes, or by his own hand or shot by some other member of the gang—all these are questions that for a few more days will have to go without answers.”

Some rumours circled around Admiral Karl Dönitz, who succeeded Hitler “as the second, and last, Fuehrer of the Nazi Reich”: “Was he really appointed by Hitler or did he seize the pathetic tatters of power?” And what did he plan? A fight to the bitter end in Norway, one of the last bits of Europe still occupied by the Nazis, or using the German navy would be madness. “The Third Reich is dead,” we wrote. “The end has been an indescribably sordid welter of blood and betrayal.”

The fall of Berlin prompted reflection on the final phase of the war in Europe. The German counter-attack in December 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge, had meant that the Nazis’ defeat came more slowly than the Allies had hoped the previous year:

“The slow asymptotic approach of the end during these last few months, always nearer but never quite reached, will make the hour of acknowledged victory, when it arrives, something of an anti-climax. This will be no grand climacteric like November 11, 1918, but one more stage reached and overcome in a world crisis that has been raging for thirty years and has many storms ahead. The moment of rejoicing will be brief, and the rejoicing itself will be restrained by the knowledge of efforts and sacrifices still to come. But a moment there will be, and though verdicts must be left to history, this, the hour of surrenders and capitulations, of liberty and victory, is the time for tributes.”

Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, apportioned the credit for the Allies’ success accordingly: “Russia, he said, had given blood, and America material wealth, while Britain had contributed time.” Britain’s success in fending off Germany while much of the rest of Europe was under occupation provided Allied countries like France with a base for their governments-in-exile—and, eventually, the staging ground for the D-Day landings. Britain’s resilience, and the Nazis’ defeat, was vindication for democracy in Europe:

“The war has been fought with skill as well as with courage. Just as in its personal aspects, the sordid end of the gangsters, caught like rats in a trap, is one of History’s monumental vindications of the moralities, so in its political aspects, the end of the war is an irrefutable proof of the values of liberty. Once again, demonstration has been given of the immense moral and physical resources upon which a free and tolerant and honest society can call. The British people have fought this war longer than most, more continuously than any, harder than many. They have fought it, in the field and at home, at sea and in the air, with technical skill and physical courage and great human qualities of imagination. Hitler called them military imbeciles; and that is why once again they have made magnificent soldiers.”

The scale of the devastation in Europe meant that the Allies faced an enormous task of rebuilding after the fighting ended. Meanwhile in eastern Europe anti-communist partisans were still fighting against the Red Army, which was extending the Soviet Union’s control across the region. Still, the collapse of the Nazi regime was cause for rejoicing. But for the formality of surrender, the war against Germany was over. ■

May

1945

May 2

Ancient Sacrifice

“So the end has come,” wrote The Economist in its edition of May 12th. Earlier that week, the fighting between the Allies and Nazi Germany had finally ceased. Once the Red Army had captured Berlin it was only a matter of time before Karl Dönitz, Adolf Hitler’s successor, and Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the chancellor, issued Germany’s formal surrender. Early on Monday May 7th they delegated General Alfred Jodl to sign the formal instrument at the Allied headquarters in France. The next day, May 8th, was Victory in Europe (VE) Day:

“On Tuesday the firing ceased, and Europe, though a long way yet from peace, was no longer at war. Germany is totally occupied. Apart from the Doenitz-Krosigk phantom, there is no German Government. The German people, in General Jodl’s anguished words, are for better or worse delivered into the victors’ hands. In the middle of Europe, where so recently there stood the most powerful and resourceful military tyranny the world has ever seen, there is now nothing but the emptiness of sorrow and silence.”

The toll of the war was immense. Around half a million Britons had died—fewer, in fact, than during the first world war. Other Allied powers suffered more: some 24m Soviet citizens died as a result of the fighting. But “human life is not to be computed statistically, and of all war’s wounds an empty heart is the only one that time does not heal.” As well as the dead, countless others would return home wounded and traumatised. The end of the fighting, therefore, brought about mixed feelings:

“These are days of many emotions. Uppermost, quite naturally, is that of thankfulness that the long ordeal, for half the world at least, is over, and that the sins of blindness and indolence and complacency that encouraged the aggressor—sins from whose taint none is free—are purged at last. It is right that there should be a brief pause of rejoicing.”

Celebration was tempered by two facts, however. First, that the war in the Pacific was still raging; and second, that Europe was fast being divided between the Allies that had liberated it from the Nazis. “It is tragic”, The Economist wrote, “that the victory which crowns the joint military effort of the three Great Powers should be overshadowed by the gravest political dissension that has yet divided them.”

After leading Britain since 1940, Winston Churchill announced the defeat of Nazi Germany to the nation.

The latest tensions had arisen over the news that 15 leaders of Poland’s underground resistance had been arrested by the Soviet Union and were awaiting trial in Moscow. The episode was a foretaste of the cold war brewing between the Soviets and the West. With such uncertainty over the continent’s future, peace would bring only partial respite:

“The period of physical courage and physical sacrifice is nearing its end. The need will now be for moral courage and mental sacrifice, if the opportunity so dearly purchased is to be taken. The quieter virtues are no less difficult, especially for a generous, tolerant, easygoing people who are slow either to anger or to forethought and quick both to forgive and forget. But if the tasks of peace can be approached with the same majestic compound of unity in freedom and responsibility that has brought the British people so triumphantly through the perils of these dreadful years, then nothing will be beyond their powers.”

Winston Churchill had evoked a similar sentiment in his speech on VE Day. Britain’s prime minister drove home the task of “rebuilding our hearth and home” and looked towards the end of war in Asia, where Japan still occupied portions of the British Empire, including Malaysia and Singapore. The fighting in Europe had ceased, but the end of the second world war was still months away. ■

31st May 1945: US Marines of the 1st Division wait on the crest of a hill in southern Okinawa, as they watch phosphorous shells explode over Japanese soldiers dug into the hills.

May 9

The Other War

After the Nazis surrendered on May 7th the fighting across most of Europe ceased. But the Allies’ victory celebrations were tempered by the continuation of the war in Asia. “In the middle of all the rejoicing for the end of the European war,” The Economist wrote on May 12th, “it should not be forgotten that for thousands of fighting men and their families, the war is not over but carries on, as hardly and as grimly as separation, distance, climate and enemy resistance can make it.”

In Asia the Allies were fighting to drive the Japanese out of the territories they had occupied during the war. In Myanmar (then Burma), a British colony since the late 19th century, the Allies were on the front foot. British troops had captured Mandalay, on the Irrawaddy river, from the Japanese in March. They regained control of the capital, Yangon (then Rangoon), on May 3rd.

But elsewhere the Allies were bogged down. On Okinawa, one of the Ryukyu islands and just 640km south of the Japanese mainland, American soldiers had been fighting for more than a month. But since then the battle had become “exceptionally bitter”: “The northern half of the island is occupied, but the southern part has so far proved impregnable.”

If the fighting on Okinawa was a foretaste of what a fight on the Japanese mainland might bring, then it was clear there would be “tough and difficult and long drawn out battles ahead”. Recapturing lost colonies was an easy task compared to forcing the Japanese regime to surrender.

“…the root and basis of Japanese aggression lies in the Japanese homeland. The reconquest of Malaya and the Netherlands Indies is an end in itself. It does not directly contribute to the immediate defeat of Japan. The battles in the inner ring of the Japanese defences have not so far proved as decisive as the distant fighting. The effects of heavy air bombardment are always difficult to assess and no one can say precisely what is their contribution to the destruction of the enemy’s war industries and civilian morale. Yet the air raids on the Japanese mainland already constitute a major offensive.”

The Allies had bombarded Tokyo and Japan’s other big cities for weeks. Heavy industry and ports had been hammered by bombs, too—and with more British bombers freed in Europe to join the Pacific campaign, the Allies’ air raids would soon increase in frequency and intensity. The decision to order Japanese soldiers to put down their arms, however, ultimately lay with the country’s leaders. The tide seemed to have turned against them:

“In many ways, the political outlook could hardly be more gloomy. Japan has been deserted by its one ally, and the Japanese press’s indignation at this defection reflects their uneasiness. Germany’s downfall is an impressive warning to any nation bent on fighting until ten minutes past twelve. Moreover, the end of the European war frees the Russians for political and military action in the Far East. Their first move was the denunciation of the Soviet-Japanese Pact of Neutrality. Is the next step open or undeclared war? If so, might not Japan, surrounded by enemies, prefer to offer unconditional surrender, hoping by shortening the war to secure better terms?”

Still, those leaders showed little sign of preparing to surrender. Although the Soviet Union had disavowed its neutrality pact with Japan, it had not yet entered the war against its rival in the Far East. That gave Japan some hope that it could avoid a fight against the three main Allied powers and “manoeuvre and bargain its way towards concessions” instead. The country’s leaders perhaps thought that divisions among the Allies—which already threatened to undermine the new peace in Europe—would play to their advantage in Asia. ■

9th July 1945: Women in post-war Berlin, East Germany, form a 'chain gang' to pass pails of rubble to a rubble dump, to clear bombed areas in the Russian sector of the city. (Photo by Fred Ramage/Keystone/Getty Images)

May 16

New Priorities for Europe

As the dust settled across Europe in the weeks after VE Day, the full scale of the war’s impact was becoming clearer. “Reports on the material condition of Europe are confused and incomplete,” wrote The Economist on May 19th, “but there is quite enough evidence to show that the chaos is appalling and will grow worse.”

The devastation wrought by the fighting varied across the continent. Countries such as France and Belgium were “relatively intact”. But in most places it seemed that the situation was worsening. Shortages of raw materials, notably coal, were common; transport routes had been destroyed. Germany, where whole towns had been flattened during the Allies’ advance, was a particular problem—not least because many of the country’s workers were prisoners of war.

“All this is familiar. It is even difficult to grasp the magnitude of the problem, so accustomed are we to ruin and devastation. Yet what a challenge it presents. To restore a functioning system in these lands ravaged by battle and distorted by years of Hitler’s war economy is a more formidable task than the actual waging of the war. Not only is the problem itself more complex, but the machinery is lacking to accomplish it properly.”

Who would take charge of Europe’s recovery? The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, the most senior Allied body, was in charge of the armed forces, transport networks and prisoners of war. Soon, though, a patchwork of military and civilian groups—including military governments—would take over. Other groups would be given more narrowly defined areas of responsibility: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (Unrra), an aid agency founded in 1943, was expected to take care of refugees, for example. The transition would be hard:

“The difficulty in adapting this military administration to the needs of Europe lies in the fact that hitherto its job from the first planning to the last execution has been a straightforward one, based on a very simple objective—to win the war. As a result, the priorities have been simple—military needs first. And this in turn has simplified administration. Now the objective is very complex—to restore a shattered continent. The priorities are correspondingly complex. And behind all the complexities, a primary decision has to be taken which military authorities will naturally find it very difficult to take. Civilian, not military, needs must now come first.”

The army’s role in running the continent produced inevitable inefficiencies. Getting displaced farmers back to their fields, The Economist argued, was a more urgent priority for Europe’s economy than getting soldiers home to Britain and America at top speed. But the Allies’ military authorities seemed set to prioritise the latter.

These circumstances made creating robust civilian authorities in Europe a pressing concern. “The division of very scarce supplies between sharply competing needs will grow worse, not better, as the winter approaches,” wrote The Economist, “but the fact that a body existed to which governments, civil authorities such as Unrra and the military could all turn—none of them being judge in its own cause—would give some guarantee that the right priorities would emerge and that reconstruction would be pursued with at least some of the vigour and efficiency hitherto devoted to war.” Rebuilding the ruined continent would require not only a strong administration, but one with the same priorities as the people it was governing. ■

Admiral Karl Doenitz surrender and in custody along with Albert Speer May 1945, Germany's unconditional surrender to the allies. As Supreme Commander of the Navy beginning in 1943, Nazi Karl Doenitz played a major role in the naval history of World War II. He was briefly the last Fuhrer of the Third Reich, jailed for 10 years at the Nuremberg Trials and released in 1956

May 23

War Crimes

With the war in Europe over, the need to hold German soldiers accountable for atrocities and reinstil a sense of moral order across the continent became pressing. The Allies had been wrestling with what to do for some time, and established the United Nations War Crime Commission (UNWCC) in October 1943. The Soviets did not take part, but they were no less concerned. They conducted the first public trial of German war criminals in Kharkiv in December 1943. All four defendants were hanged.

America, Britain and the Soviet Union all had different ideas about what to do with Nazi war criminals. The Americans were keen to put them on trial to ensure that justice was done and seen to be done. The Russians, already assured of their guilt, preferred show trials. Many of Britain’s elite favoured summary execution. Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister, even suggested to his cabinet that upon capture “world outlaws” should be “shot to death within six hours and without further reference to higher authority”.

Yet by May 1945 The Economist reported that the UNWCC had agreed that “impunity for offenders against every canon of human decency would have a pernicious effect upon international morality” and therefore it would hold trials to “re-set a standard of international behaviour”. The Soviet Union was expected to do the same.

“Their object is to re-set a standard of international behaviour. The cases are to be heard on a basis of evidence. Only the guilty will be punished. There will be no indiscriminate reprisals. Punishment will be inflicted for crimes, not political offences. The theory underlying the whole unpleasant task is that impunity for offenders against every canon of human decency would have a pernicious effect upon international morality.”

If the trials were to be successful, we argued, they would have to be held swiftly and according to common standards. Some offences were simple enough to prosecute: international law gave ample precedent for soldiers who had violated the laws of war and for traitors. But there were no precedents in international law for prosecuting soldiers for atrocities committed against their compatriots, including German Jews, Romani and gays. Nor had civilian leaders properly been held responsible for the actions of their subordinates.

“The more complicated class is that which has committed crimes against Germans or against more than one nationality or against mankind in general. Here some new form of international court is required; there is no precedent for trying war crimes through channels of organised international justice. If the recommendations of the War Crimes Commission are followed, the indicting nations will not find it too difficult to agree on the procedure for trying a small class of the ‘major criminals’ of whom Goering is the prototype. Their chief difficulty will be in deciding where to draw the line among the lesser fry, particularly among the tens of thousands of captured SS.”

The chief problem with the UNWCC’s approach, as The Economist saw it, was co-ordinating with the Russians. We worried about the emergence of two parallel systems for prosecuting war crimes, one in the West and one in the East, that quibbled over who would try certain prominent Nazis.

The Economist was unsure that any court would provide greater justice than a death like that of Benito Mussolini. In April Italy’s dictator was shot dead by the roadside and hung upside-down in Piazzale Loreto in Milan, where 15 Italian partisans had been executed a year before.

“It is not to be taken for granted that trials will serve this purpose any better than dogs’ deaths such as that which befell Mussolini. If they are to do so, they must be summary and they must be unspectacular. To allow prisoners the luxury of famous last words in a Hollywood setting would be to defeat the United Nations’ purpose. So would delays during which Europe might sicken with the smell of foul deeds gone stale.”

Ultimately, a unified approach was adopted. The Allies, including the Soviet Union, met in London in June to develop procedures for war-crimes tribunals. After over a month of fraught legal and moral discussions, they agreed on a framework that would later guide the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and greatly expand the jurisprudence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. ■

Two bill posters enjoy a cigarette break after pasting up a campaign billboard poster for John Platts-Mills, the Labour Party candidate for the north London constituency of Finsbury, on 20th June 1945. John Platts-Mills would go on to win the seat for the Labour Party in the upcoming 1945 United Kingdom general election. (Photo by Konig/Popperfoto via Getty Images)

May 30

Clearing the Air

On May 23rd the coalition government that had governed Britain since 1940 reached its end. The cabinet resigned and Winston Churchill, the prime minister, called an election—the first since 1935. “The political air has been cleared,” wrote The Economist on May 26th. The Conservative Party would campaign on Churchill’s record as a wartime leader, while the Labour Party of Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister since 1942, would go to the public with an avowedly socialist manifesto of sweeping social and economic reforms, including the establishment of a national health service and full employment.

Both sides were concerned with the scheduling of the election. Attlee was keen for the poll to be held in the autumn, but the “rank and file” of Labour were frustrated after five years in which party politics had been frozen. Churchill offered Labour a choice: either the election would take place as soon as possible, on July 5th, or it would be put off until after Japan had surrendered. The latter was unacceptable to many in Labour, and the offer was calculated to force Attlee to agree to an early vote. He believed that Churchill favoured a July election, with victory in Europe still fresh in voters’ minds, for tactical reasons:

“Conflicting reasons of the public interest are being given, on both sides, for the attitudes adopted. The real reason, however, is party advantage. The Prime Minister, in his second letter to Mr Attlee, was indignant about the ‘aspersion’ that his preference for July over October was due to a calculation of electoral gain, and in Mr Churchill himself the emotion is no doubt sincere. But in the minds of some of his closest colleagues and friends there has obviously been the calculation that an election held in the bright sunlight of victory celebrations would almost certainly redound to the advantage of the main architect of that victory and the party he leads.”

Attlee’s reasons for wanting an autumn election—which Churchill would not countenance—were also clear. He “would prefer to wait until an accumulation of difficulties, and perhaps of mistakes, has dimmed the lustre of Mr Churchill’s fame, until the elector ceases to think of him as a war leader, in which capacity he is impregnable, and begins to question him as a peace leader, where he is much weaker”. But Churchill’s ultimatum left Attlee with little choice but to agree to a vote in July.

Churchill was astonishingly popular: in May his approval rating, which had never fallen below 78% during the war, stood at 83%. But the country’s view of his party was far less favourable. The Conservatives had governed Britain, either alone or at the head of a coalition, since 1922, but for brief interludes in 1924 and 1929-31. Many still held the party responsible for the mass unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as for Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. As a result, the contest was expected to be tight:

“It is very difficult to foresee the result of the contest thus joined. The general expectation, even among many Labour people, is that the Conservative Party will return with a majority, though a reduced one, and that this result will be a personal vote of confidence in Mr Churchill. This, no doubt, is the most probable result. But it is by no means certain.”

The opportunity to replace Britain’s “very stale and superannuated House of Commons”, we wrote, was a welcome one. Yet despite the momentous news of the first election in a decade, the mood towards the two main parties appeared apathetic:

“A general election, especially after so long an interval and such tremendous events, ought to be regarded as an opportunity for a great regeneration of national purpose. That it is not so regarded by the man in the street, but rather in the guise of a resumption of normal sporting events, comparable to a cricket Test match (and almost as lengthy), reflects the fact that there is a total lack of enthusiasm for either of the major parties.”

The reason for this was the failure of both parties to fully reckon with the difficulties of modernising Britain’s economy: “The fact is that neither party has any real, practical policy, because neither party has thought at all deeply about twentieth-century Britain in a twentieth-century world, and each therefore takes refuge in a mere administration, using shades of emphasis as an apology for differences in principle.” Polling day was set for July 5th, allowing for some six weeks of campaigning; counting the votes of servicemen abroad would take a further three. The marathon of Britain’s first election campaign in a decade had begun. ■

June

1945

June 6

The End of a Dream

When the Nazis surrendered in early May, Germany was in physical ruin. It was also a political wasteland, as the Nazi regime was dismantled and replaced by the Allies’ military authorities. On June 9th The Economist published a long dispatch from Munich, the capital of Bavaria in southern Germany—now under American control—describing the surreal condition of immediate post-war life:

“The picture that greets the visitor to Germany is so indescribably fantastic, confused and contradictory that it would be futile to attempt any definite clear-cut description. The journey across Germany is a journey in a dream. Life here has lost all solid shape and outline—it is completely atomised. Germany’s national existence seems to have broken up into millions of individual beings, each with their own individual anxieties and worries; it defies any accepted sociological and political classification because the individual existences have few, if any, social ties to link them together. For a time the collective identity of the German nation has dissolved into nothingness.”

Germany had suffered defeat before, less than 30 years earlier, but this time its fate was different. After the first world war the victors occupied only parts of its territory, such as the Rhineland and the Ruhr. For the most part the country “saved not only its territory, its wealth and the fabric of its social life, but also the means for its spiritual and political self expression”.

Now the whole country was under occupation. The Allies were uprooting its institutions and purging them of what remained of the Nazi Party. “In 1945 the nation is mute,” we wrote. Germans were full of conflicted feelings over the Nazis’ fall, which felt to many like the end of a dream. “Some will say that it was nothing but a pleasant dream of world conquest, and what the Germans most feel is regret and despair at the loss of the fata morgana. Others, and the Germans first of all, claim that the dream was a nightmare that oppressed and strangled them, and that their present feeling is one of relief and gratitude.”

Bavaria held a special place in Nazi lore. The party had been founded there: in Munich in 1923 Adolf Hitler, inspired by Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome the previous year, attempted to overthrow the regional government in the Beer Hall putsch. But Bavaria had never fully embraced the party; and the strict obedience to it that the Nazis enforced (Kadaverdisciplin) had weakened as defeat became inevitable:

“Here, in Bavaria, the Kadaver-disciplin quite obviously broke down in the last days or weeks of the war—it had shown some faint cracks even before. Munich was officially called the ‘Capital of the Movement.’ In the centre of the city there stands the Mecca of National Socialism, the famous Beer Hall, now guarded by an American sentry, presumably as a grotesque relic of some museum value. Yet in this ‘Capital of the Movement,’ it is almost impossible to find anybody to attack the Nazi record. The citizens timidly tell the foreigner that Munich’s half-jocular and unofficial title was ‘the Capital of the Counter-Movement.’ Even in the hey-day of Nazism the local intelligentsia took delight in discreetly pin-pricking the Nazis on the stage or in timidly displaying an archaic sentiment for the old Wittelsbach dynasty. For the Bavarian Left, which occasionally attempted some less innocent gestures of opposition, there was the nearby Dachau concentration camp, which never failed to act as a tremendous damper on any anti-Nazi reflexes in the Bavarian mind.”

Mere weeks after the end of the European war, opportunities for expressing such sentiments were few. The occupying powers controlled all political decision-making. The Allies did not only ban the Nazi Party but suspended the activities of all political organisations for four months. Local elections would be held in 1946, but no national vote took place until West Germans voted in 1949, after the partition of the country. Our correspondent reported:

“The first shoots of a new political life in post-Nazi Bavaria are, of course, pathetically weak and anæmic. All political matters are concentrated in the officers of the Military Government and in the private homes of a few survivors of the Weimar democracy. The leaders of the new Bavarian administration act as individuals without the backing of any organised bodies of political opinion. The formation of such bodies has been strictly prohibited by the Military Government, which has made it more than sufficiently clear that there must be ‘no politics in Germany,’ and that the ban on political activities applies to all anti-Nazi groups without distinction.”

Such a state of affairs was “certainly prolonging the political formlessness which is apparent under the broken crust of the single party system”. Before the Allies clamped down, some groups had begun organising themselves in the final days of the war: “Individual survivors of the old parties of the Left—Socialists, Communists, Trade-Unionists—came together and discussed the new position. Soon they were joined by the inmates of the concentration camps.” But such groups, some of which had tried to support the Allied advance to hasten the end of the war, had fallen silent.

For our correspondent, all this posed a question: “Is the present shapelessness of German politics going to be maintained—and for how long? Or will the indubitable popular reaction against Nazism be used as a starting point for the crystallisation of a new political outlook in Germany?” The west of the country would return to democracy after 12 years of dictatorship, but it would take four difficult years. ■

June 13

Zones of Occupation

Less than a month after victory was declared in Europe, the Allies gathered in Berlin to make Germany’s surrender official. Having agreed to divide the lands of their vanquished foe between them, their attention turned to Germany’s reconstruction. For The Economist, the immediate issue was a logistical one: most Germans were in the west, but the bulk of the food was in the east. Given that the Americans, British and French controlled the former, while the Soviet Union was in charge of the latter, co-operation would be needed.

“The population of the Russian zone has, however, been very considerably reduced by the flight of German civilians and by the mass surrenders of the German armies to the Western Allies. The disproportion which existed in pre-war Germany has thus been accentuated. Unless the transfer of labourers eastwards and the despatch of foodstuffs westwards can be speedily arranged, the food in the East will not be harvested for lack of hands and the West will starve for lack of supplies. The problem can be solved only if the Allies deal with it jointly.”

Beyond the immediate task of ensuring that Germans did not starve, the Allies faced a heady question familiar to readers of Lenin: what is to be done? The Economist was disconcerted that none of the victorious powers seemed to have a policy for the political reorganisation of Germany after its defeat.

“Is the Allies’ policy for Germany to destroy for ever the single centralised state? If so, is this to be done merely by decentralisation or by federation? Or are independent states to be carved out of the old Reich? Or is it intended to split Germany by drawing the different zones permanently into the ‘sphere of influence’ of one or other of the victors?”

Without such a policy, we thought, there could be no plan for Germany’s economy. We lamented that the Allies had not even decided whether it was to have “an industrial or a pastoral future”. In the absence of a coherent policy, each power was pursuing its own. If that continued, we warned, “there can be little doubt that ruin lies ahead.”

That turned out to be unduly pessimistic, given the rapid economic rise at least of West Germany after the war. But at the time, it seemed as if the Soviets would lead Germany’s recovery. We chastised the British and Americans for offering the German people no positive vision of their future while Soviet radio broadcasts gave them hope, however improbable.

“One last point of divergence is the picture the various victors give the German people of their future. The British and the Americans are silent. They make no propaganda. They put across no line. Their radio stations still give little but lists of prohibitions and penalties. Berlin radio, on the other hand, gives the Germans a glimmer of hope that if they work hard and eliminate their own Nazis they will one day, with ‘the help of the great Soviet Union’ find their way back to the world of nations. Mere broadcasts may be dismissed as a propaganda stunt. If so, it is an effective one. The darkness before the Germans is so impenetrable and their fate is so irrevocably out of their hands that any sign of a policy, any hope of a positive future cannot fail to stir their minds and make them look, however uncertainly, to a dawn of hope in the Eastern sky.”

The Economist implored the Allies to find a way to unite Germany, arguing that a divided country’s “struggles for reunion” would “disturb the politics of Europe for decades”. In fact the cold war was right around the corner. ■

June 20

The New Charter

The United Nations was long in the making. As early as 1941 America and Britain had signalled their desire to establish “a wider and permanent system of general security”. In April 1945 delegates from 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to try to realise that ambition. After nine weeks of discussion, on June 26th they signed the UN charter, creating a supra-national body entrusted with containing the bellicose passions of the world.

The failures of the League of Nations, a similar attempt to ensure peace after the first world war, haunted the delegates. Yet The Economist was optimistic that the UN might succeed where the League had failed.

Why? First, with the UN, unlike its precursor, America and the Soviet Union would be involved from the start. This was crucial, we argued, because the force of any such organisation would inevitably come from its strongest members, who are “above the law because they are the wielders of the power behind the law”. That America, Britain, China, France and the Soviet Union would be permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, each with a veto on UN policy, reflected this.

Second, the vain hope that countries could be led to peace by the better angels of their nature was this time put aside for a more Hobbesian realism.

Harry Truman, America's president, sets out the stakes for the nascent United Nations.

“The Charter cannot be accused of excessive idealism. On the contrary, almost every article is marked with the experience of two grim decades between the wars during which, in Europe especially, power politics, imperialism and aggression grew up like tenacious ivy within and over the brave new League. In the United Nations Charter, there is no reliance upon better and more idealistic methods of conducting international relations. The dominant position is occupied by those whose physical power would give them a dominant position in any unorganised world society.”

Cynics, we wrote, might complain that the charter was nothing more than “old expedients and separate nationalism writ large and covered over with a stucco facing of general good will”. Yet we pointed out that it was precisely that high-mindedness that had caused the League to fall apart. Assured of the value of their collective endeavour, its members lost sight of the need to take individual responsibility for the defence of peace by arms.

“Did not the belief that the League transcended the Powers which were its members, that the Covenant was in itself a guarantee against war and that collective security was an alternative to national defence and not an extension of it—did not these illusions make the chance of keeping peace more, not less, difficult? Collective security, by making the checking of aggression the responsibility of all, left it the responsibility of none.”

We observed that the new body, shorn of the League’s “utopian élan”, and with the responsibility for keeping the peace resting with the Great Powers, resembled the patchwork of alliances that had hitherto failed to stave off war. But it had one great advantage over them: it offered a forum for the airing of grievances.

“The conference itself has already shown how powerful the effect of world opinion can be on the policy of great States and how salutary the public airing of injustice and heavy handedness can be. As a forum of world opinion, the international structure of the new League can play a direct part in checking wrongdoing and aggression.”

As with the League of Nations before it, the new body would work only “if the Powers within it so desire and so work” and if the covenant’s most powerful countries observed “good and pacific international conduct”. As the UN’s first 80 years have shown, such benevolence is often in scarce supply. ■

1945: Liberated French prisoners on a road, west of Berlin, passing by a Russian Stalin tanks which had travelled 2,000 miles during the course of the war.

June 27

Bavarian Roads

In June 1945 The Economist published its second dispatch from a correspondent in post-war Munich. Our report described a journey through southern Bavaria. Elsewhere in Germany there was a “sharp contrast” between life in the towns, which “seem to be waiting for a German Jeremiah to bewail their ruins”, and the placid countryside. But the Bavarian roads were “a cross-section of the great problems of Germany and Europe”. German soldiers, demobilised after the Nazis’ surrender, were on their way home:

“South of Munich, against the sharp background of the Alps, can be watched the last scenes of the Wehrmacht’s surrender. Long convoys of lorries crammed with German soldiers, preceded by officers in staff cars, roll on to assembly points and prisoners’ cages. The soldiers are disarmed, some officers—Luftwaffe, SS, infantrymen—still carry their side-arms, and shout loudly in the typical feldwebel fashion their last orders to the men.”

People who had survived the Holocaust were also on the roads. Many of those liberated from the Nazis’ concentration camps were returning to their home towns. Others were travelling west towards territory liberated by the Allies, who established camps to receive them.

The criss-crossing routes of soldiers and refugees led to some surreal encounters. Our correspondent wrote of a meeting between a freed prisoner and an officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazis’ main wartime paramilitary unit:

“Somewhere by the side of the road a man in the striped uniform of the concentration camp is trudging slowly home. A short time ago he was stopped by an SS officer, travelling with his orderly in a car. A sharp exchange of words and threats accompanied by violent gesticulation takes place. As an American jeep approaches the quarrel stops, and the SS officer’s car moves off. The ex-inmate of the concentration camp explains with some pride that he was an official of the Social Democratic party at Breslau. Yes, it is true. SS men occasionally bully people like this on the roads.”

The man heading to Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) faced an uncertain fate under Russian occupation. Until he was “dragged away to the concentration camp”, we wrote, “he had been a ‘Social-Fascist’ in the eyes of local Communists.”

Others were on the roads, too. A group of Roma from Germany, whom the Nazis had persecuted, were travelling in a convoy. “They want to work; and the fatherland or the victors must provide employment for them.” Other people were searching for their families:

“At the other side of the road, a tall, thin woman tries to explain something in broken English to two American officers. In her confused, unintelligible story two words keep on recurring: Gas-kammer. It turns out that seven years ago her child was classified by a Nazi doctor as mentally defective. The family doctor disagreed with the diagnosis, but his opinion was ignored. In accordance with the rules of ‘racial hygiene’ the child would have to be thrown into a gas-chamber, the Nazi version of the Tarpeian rock. The mother hid the child in a remote place, some two hundred kilometres away. The last time she saw the child it was nearly starving. Could she now get a permit from the Military Government to go and fetch her child?”

Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jews, Slavs, Roma and other ethnic and social groups, including his political opponents, had ravaged the continent. Now a wave of migration followed. “The sufferings and fears of half a score of nationalities have for a while met here, in the middle of the pleasant sunlit Bavarian road. Soon they will float away, each carried by a different wind and into a different country.” Europe’s demographics—its diversity, the distribution of its peoples, and its culture—were transformed for ever. ■

July

1945

July 4

The Tumult Dies

On July 5th Britons went to the polls. The first general election since 1935 was unusual. Party politics had in effect been frozen during six long years of war. And although the fighting was over in Europe, millions were yet to return home. Of the 25m people who voted, roughly 1.7m servicemen and -women would do so by proxy or by post. “There succeeds the curious period of twilight hush while the secret of the public’s choice remains hidden in the sealed ballot boxes and every hotel in the country is filled with exhausted candidates in postures of nervous expectancy,” wrote The Economist on July 7th. The wait would be longer than usual. To allow time for all the votes to be counted, the result would not be announced for three weeks.

Partners in wartime, Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party and Clement Attlee’s Labour Party fought each other hard for the right to govern in peace. Local Labour activists gained a bad reputation for heckling and disrupting Conservative and Liberal meetings. At the national level, however, it was the Tories who deserved censure:

“But on the national stage, in the newspapers and on the wireless, the roles have been reversed. Here the Labour Party has conducted its campaign with great dignity and good feeling, while the Conservatives have resorted to stunts, red herrings and unfair practices to an extent that has disgusted many of their friends and followers—and, if the truth could be told, most of their leaders outside the charmed circle. The constructive moderation of Mr Eden, Mr Butler and Sir John Anderson has, with the Prime Minister’s active help, been overridden by the circus.”

Churchill, who became prime minister in 1940 after the House of Commons forced out Neville Chamberlain, had never won a general election. He lamented that he lacked a compelling vision for the future to convey to voters: “I have no message for them.” He fell back on dark rhetoric. On June 4th, less than two weeks after Attlee left his government, Churchill said the Labour leader would “need some form of Gestapo” to implement his programme. Alluding to the horrors of fascism and communism that had swept the continent, he warned that Attlee’s left-wing platform was “inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state”.

“It is very difficult indeed to see in the Churchill of these last few weeks the statesman who puts his country above party,” we wrote. The bitterness of the Conservative campaign was a worrying sign that the party was unprepared for the task of rebuilding Britain. The new government would have to deal with manifold problems:

“When all is said and done, they have not encouraged very many hopes that either of the major parties would confront the enormous and novel tasks of the next few years with the energy that the predicament of the country requires. Such things as foreign and imperial policy, the maintenance of the enormous burden of external indebtedness, the preservation of industrial peace and social unity—all these things require heavy efforts, great skill, a willingness to try new methods, clarity of thought and high courage.”

The previous month, The Economist had written approvingly of Attlee’s campaign. In contrast to Churchill, the Labour leader’s radio broadcasts had been “moderate, sensible, constructive, fair”. Still, it was hard to imagine Attlee, a retiring former barrister, beating the prime minister who had come to embody Britain’s wartime struggle: “In elections…you cannot beat somebody with nobody.” It was also hard to be sure that Attlee’s front bench was up to the job. It would be hard for Labour—which had never won a majority at a general election—to convince voters that they would govern more competently than the Tories. Nevertheless:

“Some day there will be a re-alignment of political forces behind which the capacities of the nation can be mobilised for peace as they were in 1940 for war. Mr Churchill could have started the second task as he has finished the first. He made it difficult for himself by accepting a party leadership, and his behaviour in this election has made it finally impossible for him to serve as the rallying point for a truly national policy of social and economic regeneration.”

Labour had tried hard to capture this mood. “And now—win the peace,” was the message emblazoned on one of the party’s best-known campaign posters. By contrast, Churchill had squandered his immense personal popularity by “turning himself into a narrow party politician”. Now both sides, and the electorate, were in for a nerve-rattling three-week wait. ■

This is the latest entry in our timeline of the war. Come back on Fridays to read new instalments. To be notified about new entries, sign up for The War Room, our weekly defence newsletter.

Keep reading

As part of Archive 1945, we have been publishing guest essays on the end of the second world war. Read Dan Stone on the liberation of Dachau, Richard Evans on Adolf Hitler’s death, Stephen Kotkin on the Yalta conference and Alexis Dudden on the firebombing of Tokyo. Also try our piece on five of the best books about the second world war.

To explore more of our archive, play Dateline, our weekly history quiz.

If you want to learn more about the second world war and how it changed the world, explore our A to Zs of military terms and international relations.

Images:

Alamy; Bridgeman; Getty Images

Video:

Getty Images; The Economist

Archive 1945

How The Economist reported on the final year of the second world war, week by week

⇒Go to the latest entry

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

January 3

Deadlock in Europe

The mood in Britain was grim. Although the Nazis were still being squeezed on both sides of the continent, The Economist declared “Deadlock in Europe”:

“No motor-cars, refrigerators, pianos, vacuum cleaners, tennis or golf balls have been produced since 1942, and only very few radios, bicycles, watches and fountain pens.”

January 10

Divided China

The civil wars that had broken out in liberated countries in Europe seemed to augur ill for China:

January 17

The neglected ally

Bread was rationed at 13 ounces (370g) a day, and cheese at 0.75 ounces (20g) a week. Even then, there was “no guarantee that even these meagre rations can be supplied”.

France’s port cities had been battered. Boulogne lay in ruins, but Marseille was already sending supplies to the frontline. In Nantes, large crowds welcomed de Gaulle on January 14th.

Video: Getty Images

Meanwhile a very different picture of liberation was emerging in eastern Europe, where the Nazis had been pushed out by the Soviet Union:

January 24

Germany’s war machine

January 31

Ads in a time of war

February

1945

February 7

Conference in the Crimea

February 14

The German rump

February 21

Trouble in Tokyo

February 28

Oh I would like to be beside the seaside!

Children would return to beaches with their buckets and spades in the summer of 1945. In this video from July, barbed wire still stretches across the railings of a seafront promenade.

Video: British Movietone/AP

March

1945

March 7

One more river

March 14

Balkan Turmoil

The proliferation of disputes both internal and external was worrying:

March 21

Russian Reconstruction

The western regions of the Soviet Union, which were the site of heavy fighting as they were liberated from Nazi control, had experienced untold destruction. We wrote:

The state of the economy varied across the vast sweep of the Soviet Union, however. We explained:

March 28

Battle of Germany

April

1945

April 4

War and Peace

April 11

Two Presidents

April 18

Russia and Japan

April 25

Gangsters’ End

May

1945

May 2

Ancient Sacrifice

After leading Britain since 1940, Winston Churchill announced the defeat of Nazi Germany to the nation.

May 9

The Other War

May 16

New Priorities for Europe

May 23

War Crimes

May 30

Clearing the Air

June

1945

June 6

The End of a Dream

June 13

Zones of Occupation

June 20

The New Charter

Second, the vain hope that countries could be led to peace by the better angels of their nature was this time put aside for a more Hobbesian realism.

Harry Truman, America's president, sets out the stakes for the nascent United Nations.

June 27

Bavarian Roads

July

1945

July 4

The Tumult Dies

This is the latest entry in our timeline of the war. Come back on Fridays to read new instalments. To be notified about new entries, sign up for The War Room, our weekly defence newsletter.

Keep reading

To explore more of our archive, play Dateline, our weekly history quiz.

If you want to learn more about the second world war and how it changed the world, explore our A to Zs of military terms and international relations.

Images:

Alamy; Bridgeman; Getty Images

Video:

Getty Images; The Economist

Archive 1945

January 3

Deadlock in Europe

January 10

Divided China

January 17

The neglected ally

January 24

Germany’s war machine

January 31

Ads in a time of war

February

1945

February 7

Conference in the Crimea

Stephen Kotkin writes for Archive 1945

February 14

The German rump

February 21

Trouble in Tokyo

February 28

Oh I would like to be beside the seaside!

March

1945

March 7

One more river

Alexis Dudden writes for Archive 1945

March 14

Balkan Turmoil

March 21

Russian Reconstruction

March 28

Battle of Germany

April

1945

April 4

War and Peace

April 11

Two Presidents

Five books about the end of the war

April 18

Russia and Japan

April 25

Gangsters’ End

Richard Evans writes for Archive 1945

May

1945

May 2

Ancient Sacrifice

May 9

The Other War

May 16

New Priorities for Europe

May 23

War Crimes

May 30

Clearing the Air

June

1945

June 6

The End of a Dream

June 13

Zones of Occupation

June 20

The New Charter

Thant Mynit-U on the UN at 80

June 27

Bavarian Roads

Dan Stone writes for Archive 1945

July

1945

July 4

The Tumult Dies

Keep reading

Archive 1945

January 3

Deadlock in Europe

January 10

Divided China

January 17