Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2020/Op-ed


 * By Nick-D

August 2020 is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.

I have a strong interest in the last phase of World War II, and particularly the events of 1945. The year saw an escalation in the fighting in both Europe and the Pacific, with the Allied forces hitting the peak of their effectiveness and crushing resistance which was sometimes fanatical but more frequently hopelessly outclassed. It also led to some of the most morally troubling aspects of the war for the Allies, with the Red Army committing atrocities against civilians and imposing Communist rule on Eastern Europe and the western Allied air forces destroying much of urban Germany and Japan. The German and Japanese leadership added to their many crimes by prolonging an obviously lost war until their nations were on the brink of total destruction, going as far as to conscript children and force them into suicidal combat. After the fighting ended, the Asian wars of independence got going and Europe began its long climb back to civilisation.

It's fair to say that my interest in the topic isn't widely shared. We have a vast number of articles on the fighting during 1945, but the quality is variable and there are lots of gaps in our coverage. Without doing any proper research, my impression has long been that our coverage of the earlier stages of the war is more comprehensive.To a large degree, this reflects the literature on the war which tends to concentrate on the period 1940-1944. There are lots of good reasons for this, as these were the years where the outcome of the conflict was in the balance (1940-42) and then decided (1943-44). It's fair to say that as a result this period will be of most interest to readers given that it's when the most dramatic events of the war occurred.

However, overlooking 1945 comes at a cost. By focusing on the earlier periods of the war, our understanding of the important question of why the Allies won (to quote the title of Richard Overy's excellent book) is incomplete. This contributes to the frequent over-estimation of the performance of the German and Japanese armed forces and under-appreciation of how capable the Allied militaries became - by 1945 the Red Army was probably the most powerful army in human history up to that time, and the US Navy the most powerful fleet. In addition, it leads to gaps in our understanding of the human costs of the war - such as the fact that the German and Japanese governments' decision to fight on in the face of certain defeat led directly to millions of avoidable deaths, widespread destruction and vast human misery. The increasing brutality of the Axis governments and the relief felt by most citizens of these countries at the end of the war can also be over-looked. We also run the risk of under-appreciating the challenges which the victors faced and overcame: at the end of the war they had to balance the challenges of restarting the devastated European and Asian economies and restoring governance to these areas with the urgent need to demobilise their forces and rebuild their own civilian economies.

I'd encourage editors to mark this anniversary by looking for articles on 1945 which could be improved or created - there are a lot of them, and they make for very interesting subjects to research and write about. And of course, in these difficult times we should also reflect on the triumph of good over evil (or at least the triumph of the lesser evil in the case of Eastern Europe and some other parts of the world) and the achievements of the post-war era and remember that better days will come for us as well.