The Second World War: A People's History

281 Pages·2003·3.891 MB·English

by  Joanna Bourke

The Second World War

The Second World War
A People’s History
JOANNA BOURKE
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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© Joanna Bourke 2001
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First published 2001
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bourke, Joanna.
The Second World War : a people’s history / Joanna Bourke.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World War, 1939–1945 I. Title.
D743 .B62 2001 904.53—dc21 2001045152
ISBN 0–19–280224–0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in New Baskerville
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Maps ix
1 Introduction 1
2 The Declaration of War in Europe 8
3 Occupied Europe 25
4 Battle of the Atlantic 47
5 War in China, Burma, and India 55
6 War in South-East Asia and the Pacific 74
7 Italy, the Balkans, and the Desert 100
8 The Eastern Front 119
9 The Holocaust 137
10 Liberating Europe 162
11 Hiroshima 175
12 Aftermath 190
13 The Memory of War 216
Notes 227
contents
Chronology 237
Further Reading 247
Index 251
vi
List of Figures
1 ‘Rendezvous’, showing Hitler meeting Stalin over the Nazi-
Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (cartoon by David Low).
2 Polish girl weeping over her sister, killed by German
bombing of Poland.
3 The Battle of the Atlantic from the Allies’ point of view
(cartoon by Stephen Roth, Czech artist in exile in
London).
4 Japanese warship under attack by an American bomber,
near Amoy, China, 6 April 1945.
5 Chinese militia and peasants destroying a railway line to
impede the Japanese in North China, 1941.
6 Severed head of a Japanese soldier hanging from a tree in
Burma. It was presumably put there by American soldiers.
7 ‘Eastern Pirate’s Speciality’ (cartoon by Cai Ruohong).
The bodies on the ground are labelled ‘people’.
8 American POWs with their hands tied behind their backs,
just before starting the Death March out of Bataan in April
1942.
9 Japanese POWs, captured on Bataan, being led blind-
folded to the Headquarters for questioning (undated).
10 A survivor of Kalagon Village, north of Moulmein in
Burma, picking out members of the Kempeitai at an iden-
tity parade at Moulmein Jail.
list of figures
11 ‘The Heroines of 1940’, a Greek poster in tribute to the
Greek resistance to the Italian invasion of 1940.
12 ‘Grief, Kerch, 1942’: the aftermath of a Nazi massacre of
civilians at Kerch, in the Ukraine (photograph by the
Soviet photographer, Dmitri Baltermants).
13 ‘Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, Tania’: a partisan tortured to
death by the Germans (photograph by Serguei
Strunnikov).
14 Street fighting in Stalingrad, 1942.
15 Russian cartoon by Koukrinikci. The Russian text says,
‘Napoleon suffered defeat. The same thing will happen to
Hitler’.
16 A group of Jewish women, some with babies in their arms,
before their execution in Misocz, Ukraine, 14 October
1942. Local collaborators are shown assisting the
Germans.
17 A Jewish girl being terrorized by a Ukrainian mob.
18 The effect of a firestorm in Hamburg, August 1943.
19 ‘Travel Orders (1945)’ (cartoon by George Baker, pub-
lished in Yank). ‘Sad Sacks’ was an army term for a useless
soldier or a ‘sad sack of shit’.
20 ‘Ground Zero’, Nagasaki on the morning of 10 August
1945 (photograph by Yamahata Yosuke).
21 ‘Young War Victims, Rome 1948’, showing limbless chil-
dren playing (photograph by David Seymour).
viii
List of Maps
1 Europe, 22 June 1941.
2 The Far East, showing the Japanese attacks between
December 1941 and March 1942.
3 The locations of the main concentration and death camps.
4 The percentage of Japanese cities destroyed by Allied air
attack.