A Promise Of Peace?
Europe is in ruins but it's the end of the proposed
1000 year Reich. Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf (My
Struggle): "Even if we cannot conquer we will drag the
world into destruction with us." German refugees and soldiers
flee west away from the ever advancing, avenging Russians.
A Promise Of Peace?
Germany surrenders. War in Europe is over: VE
Day, 8th of May 1945. There are over 700,000 concentration camp
survivors and 6,000,000 slave labourers from across the Nazi-occupied
countries. All set free to return... home? Captured Nazis face
charges for war crimes at the Nuremberg
Trials. There is no peace conference like at the end of
WW1, and Germany is carved up between the Allies, divided into
four sectors between the victors, British, Americans, Russians
and French. In the heart of the Russian sector is Berlin. Berlin
is also quartered between the victors.
A Promise Of Peace?
There is The
Pacific War, Japan and the Atomic Bomb.
A Promise Of Peace?
Churchill had warned about an "Iron Curtain"
falling across Europe, and fall it does. In a speech on 5th March
1946 at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri in the United States,
Churchill announced : "From
Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain
has descended across the Continent." The occupation
zones become frontiers, a division of ideology. While the western
Allies rebuild western Europe with American money, Russia uses
its newly-gained territory as a buffer zone against future attacks
from the west. A new war arises from the warm ashes, but this
war is a Cold War.
A Promise Of Peace?
With the French returning to Indochina as a colonial
power, violence erupts. This will be just a prelude to the American
war in Vietnam, another move that will be played out in the Cold
War.
A Promise Of Peace?
But as an "Iron Curtain" falls across Europe,
a "Bamboo Curtain" falls across Asia, and before Vietnam... there
will be Korea.
A Promise Of Peace?
As World War I was a prelude to World War II,
World War II sets the stage for World War III. For fear is the
chill factor of The Cold War.
: Modern World War II Published
Newpaper Articles :
"Those who do
not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
