Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So, total war involves the participation of entire populations, as we saw with World War
I.
But if anything, populations participated far more—both willingly and unwillingly—across
Eurasia and Africa during World War II.
Lethal weapons played a huge role, of course, but so did human labor and the systems we
created to capture and allocate resources--not just guns and ships but also food, and medications,
and even books.
To cite just one example, shortly before the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald died in
1940, he tried to find one of his books at several bookstores--but none carried them.
Because he and his work were almost entirely forgotten--until the U.S. Army started sending
out Armed Services Editions of novels to soldiers in the war.
Among the books distributed was Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which went from being almost
out of print to being a Great American Novel thanks to the U.S. soldiers who read it, and
the army that distributed it.
In military history, we tend to focus on the generals and the weaponry, both of which are
important.
But to really understand World War II, we also need to look at the experiences of soldiers
and civilians.
[Intro] Most Europeans did not welcome the war.
I mean, remember, World War I had only ended a couple decades earlier, and it had been
a horrific trauma that, many felt, hadn’t in the end done much to make the world better.
In Germany, however, many soldiers were riding a wave of nationalist enthusiasm that Hitler
had aroused with his attacks on the Versailles Treaty and the takeover of the Rhineland,
Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
And they were also mostly enthusiastic about the invasion of Poland in 1939.
Which brings us to a big point in our study of history: We like to cordon evil off, to
make evil the domain of a few demented individuals, ideally individuals who seem quite different
from us.
But whether it’s the Transatlantic slave trade or Nazism or the genocide we’ll explore
next week, we see again and again that evil is not the product of demented individuals;
it is the product of demented social orders.
Yes, it took a leader like Hitler to encourage others to dehumanize and destroy the lives
of outsiders.
But why are we willing to listen to such voices?
And so another reason to look at the war as experienced by so-called regular people is
that it paints in stark relief the reality that evil is not exceptional.
But right, back to the war: Italian soldiers also enthused not just over their conquest
of Ethiopia but of Mussolini’s attacks that coordinated with Germany’s.
Even in the depths of battlefield suffering, commitment and loyalty to Mussolini were very
strong: “Terrible night from the seventeenth to
the eighteenth (1941),” one wrote home.
“In that night, which I will remember all my life, which I would pass entirely on foot
under the snow and rain that soaked my shoes.
. . and froze three toes.
The only thing that keeps me always on my feet and always ready: Faith in God and in
the Duce.”
That is, Mussolini Throughout the war, soldiers suffered and
died in extraordinary numbers but civilian losses were even worse.
In fact, they were much worse.
Across Europe, houses, public buildings, and factories were bombed, with entire towns and
villages sometimes obliterated, along with their inhabitants.
In Britain close to one third of all housing was entirely destroyed.
Germans dropped thirty thousand bombs on the city of Swansea (Wales) alone in a three-day
raid in 1941.
The Allies, in turn, firebombed German cities, including Dresden, which became the subject
of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five.
Still, soldiers endured unendurable hardship, especially on the eastern front and especially
as Hitler stopped the production of warm winter clothing and other necessities.
Many soldiers froze to death.
But they somehow still remained motivated.
As is often the case in war, soldiers and the personnel who served them, even if not
ideologically aligned with the governments they served, often reported ultimately fighting
not for country or ideology but for their comrades, who they came to see as “bands
of brothers.”
And sisters.
To cite just one example, Vera Ivanovna Malakhova, a Russian doctor in the prolonged and horrific
battle of Stalingrad noted that she was saved by the senior physician in her regiment, as
he found a horse, gave her his spare pair of slacks, and wrapped the horse’s mane
around her hands.
Eventually, they found more soldiers and together they found safety.
“And that’s how I got out of the encirclement,” thanks to the loyalty of the senior physicians
and the unity of the comrades-in-arms.
And while we often think of the lives of soldiers as being all about shooting or being shot,
when you read accounts written by regular soldiers, one thing that comes up again and
again is the daily challenges...the miseries of being cold, and tired, and hungry.
Did the center of the world just open?
There’s some Campbells soup in here, which I am going to enjoy later.
We don’t talk nearly enough in military history about food.
soldiers, what with the constant marching and digging, need to eat a lot.
Strategies for feeding soldiers varied throughout the war, but in the US army, one of the strategies
used was the C ration, which came in a can, and in three varieties: meat and beans, meat
and potato hash, or meat and vegetable stew.
By most accounts, none of them were great.
But also, initially, they came with very flimsy paper wrapping, which fell off immediately,
and so you didn’t know which one you were going to get.
But at least you always knew you were going to get “meat.”
Ugh.
I mean, suddenly, Campbell’s tomato soup seems amazing.
But, of course, most of the combatants in Europe in World War II were not Americans...they
were fighting closer to home.
And for many, the homefront was also the battlefront.
So the line between civilian and military blurred, as civilians might be informers,
or collaborators, or resisters.
And the nature of governments was also changing on whatever still existed of the homefront--government
was expanding, as it often does during total war, to allocate goods and organize transportation.
European governments often decided how much food and clothing people could access through
ration cards, and governments took control of transport, medical, and other systems--a
change that would have a deep and lasting effect in Europe.
The war changed Europeans’ ideas about what governments could and should do: For instance,
there was no national health service in the United Kingdom before World War II.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
Governments actually sent out recipes for cooking,
2.
showing how ersatz or alternative ingredients could be used as substitutes for scarce products
like meat, fats, and sugar.
3.
For example, instead of coffee consumers could drink hot beverages made from herbs and other
plants like chicory.
4.
And governments were involved in art-making and propaganda as well:
5.
To boost and militarize civilian morale and also to entertain,
6.
filmmakers were directed by governments to make patriotic films about war heroes successfully
facing off with evil enemy forces.
7.
A soldier in the Soviet film “Two Warriors” (1943) sings around the campfire about his
wife tending the cradle
8. and of the ways in which the knowledge of her fidelity saves his life, despite the
bullets whizzing by.
9.
Soldiers and officers stationed in large cities and capitals like Paris
10.
often enjoyed peacetime entertainment in cafés alongside privileged urban residents.
11.
Meanwhile, many authors, composers, entertainers, and scholars
12.
escaped to enrich the culture and science of the United States, Canada, and other places
of refuge
13. --from the painter Piet Mondrian to the novelist Thomas Mann.
14.
In Paris, some of the most famous actors performed during the occupation
15. to audiences in which German officers had the best seats.
16.
After the war these performers countered charges of collaboration with the defense that they
were doing a job.
17.
Or, as one French working-class woman said, under the occupation
18.
“everyone worked for the Germans.”
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Ideas about gender also played an important role in the war: Nazi ideology never shut
up about the German male’s invincibility and racial superiority.
Women, who “knew their place,” were supposed to concentrate on breeding and raising the
next generations of racial patriots to support their male masters.
In fact, there were bronze, silver, and gold “mother’s crosses” based on how many
children you had--bronze if you had four or five kids, silver if you had six or seven,
and gold if you had eight or more.
Nazis and Italian fascists removed women from the workforce except for jobs as domestic
servants and agricultural workers.
Many women adhered to the Nazi ideology of women’s subservience by keeping themselves
occupied in the household even at the height of the war when their labor was sorely needed
in industrial production.
In contrast, Soviet women rushed to defend the nation, especially after the invasion
by the Nazis.
The USSR did share the ideology that men were the armed protectors and women and children
the inferior protected ones.
But it also talked equality, especially around jobs in heavy industry.
Women worked with big machinery and in the early days of the war they were enlisted in
battlefront nursing corps.
Then, as Germany invaded, tens of thousands of Soviet women rushed to join frontline troops.
As Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, editorialized in 1941 “A Soviet woman loves
her motherland passionately.
And if the enemy dares to attack our country, the enemy will be beaten, beaten without mercy.
Woman will stand up as a fighter, equal in her rights, next to man.”
Say what you will about the Soviets, but my God they could do some propaganda.
So, hundreds of thousands of Soviet women participated in combat, and hundreds of thousands
more were army nurses, doctors, orderlies, and support staff to the military.
British women also contributed, as the National Service Act of December 1941 conscripted women
into military, farming, or munitions jobs.
From 1943 until the war’s end, 80 percent of married women in the UK and 90 percent
of single women served the war effort, including playing crucial roles in code-breaking and
the secret planning of military campaigns.
And even though they were forbidden to assume combat roles, many women still learned to
use rifles and other weapons on their own time.
Others learned to fly airplanes.
As conditions worsened for Germany with the battle of Stalingrad, Nazi officials tried
to achieve the full employment of women that had put the USSR and Britain’s productivity
so far ahead of Germany’s.
But propagandizing that women’s role was in the home and subservient to the male protector
had been all too successful.
Meanwhile, in Leningrad and in Bengal, millions were dying of wartime famine.
Germans began the siege of Leningrad in September of 1941, cutting off heating and food supplies.
Starving citizens ate cats,and birds, and castor oil, and even the glue from wallpaper,
but, as one noted with black humor, “not all people in the enormous city had such supplementary
sources of food.”
Deprived of nourishment, Leningraders nonetheless dug anti-tank trenches and watched for fires
set by German infiltrators, as bodies piled up in a city that lacked wood for coffins.
Still, radio and live performances continued, aiming to boost morale.
When the siege ended in January 1944, between 800,000 and 1.4 million people had died.
Among them was a child named Viktor Putin, whose parents nearly died of starvation but
survived the war.
Their third son Vladimir Putin was born in 1952.
And then there was the civilian catastrophe that was the scorched earth infliction of
famine on India in 1943, the very colony that contributed some 2.5 million soldiers to the
British war cause.
In that year, Winston Churchill, the unquestionably racist if eloquent British prime minister,
had thousands of tons of grain removed from India and sent to build up supplies at home
using several justifications:
the British claimed the Indians already had plenty of food, that the Japanese might take
it all if they invaded, and that the British needed the grain more than the already “fat”
Indians.
Australia and the United States offered grain to India, but Churchill had those offers rebuffed,
perhaps to weaken the Indian drive for independence.
This manufactured famine led to the deaths of an estimated 3 million children and adults.
It is also another reminder that famines on that scale are almost never natural, and are
almost always inflicted by humans on each other.
Next time, we will consider the holocaust and further mass murder in World War II, but
I want to leave you today with the Bengal famine, because it is a horrifying reminder
of what happens when we imagine others as less than human.
There were of course also heroes throughout the war--agricultural scientists in Leningrad
who starved to death while surrounded by edible seeds that they had sworn to protect for future
harvests; Indian men and women who gave what little they had to those in even greater need;
and wartime resisters who helped escapees over borders or onto boats to safety.
That is also part of human nature.
But none of us is immune from the evil that inevitably proceeds from the dehumanization
of others.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.