Название: Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945
Автор: Aviel Roshwald
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 467
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 18.0 MB

The term “total war” evokes images of violent clashes between militaries and of mass mobilization, as well as indiscriminate targeting, of civilian populations over the course of a protracted armed conflict. The Second World War featured these characteristics on an unimaginable scale. But for much of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of wartime experience was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers. This was a function of the relatively quick and massive victories won early on by the principal aggressor states, starting with Japan’s 1937 onslaught on China, and continuing with Germany’s partition of Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Nazis’ decisive victories in Northern and Western Europe the following year, the German advance into Southeastern Europe (as well as parts of North Africa) and its deep inroads into Soviet territory in 1941, and Japan’s sweep into Southeast Asia in 1941–42. The rest of the war was dominated by the long-drawn-out efforts of the principal Allied powers (Britain, the USSR, and the United States) to reverse these initial outcomes. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of people found themselves under one form or another of Axis control or domination.

A steady stream of archive-based monographs is constantly enriching historians’ understanding of how these occupations played out in individual countries. But there has been very little in the way of broadly comparative syntheses of this crucial aspect of the war. This book sets out to develop a thematically structured approach to this task. Its focus is explicitly on the political dimensions of responses to occupation, with the understanding that the political is intimately intertwined with the personal, the social, the economic, and the cultural. It is a study of the fragility and resilience of loyalties and identities under extreme conditions. The ordeal of wartime occupation by Axis powers was shared by an extraordinarily wide array of regions and peoples across significant stretches of Europe and Asia, from the Channel Islands in the west to the Philippines in the east. The most consistent feature of the occupations was the transformative impact they had on the countries that underwent them.

Berlin resumed an expansionist path in 1938, with the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region, justifying both seizures through the right to national self-determination of these lands’ German-speaking populations. The British and French, notoriously, acquiesced to these moves, but drew a line following Hitler’s dismantling of the rump Czechoslovak state in March 1939 and declared war following his invasion of Poland in September. As the Japanese were to do, Nazi Germany achieved spectacular successes in its initial series of campaigns between 1939 and 1941, which brought the bulk of the European continent under its direct or indirect control.

The wartime coordination of policy by Germany, Japan, Italy, and their lesser allies was haphazard. Hitler approved the 1939 German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact at a time when armed conflict between Japanese and Soviet forces along the Mongolian–Manchurian border was culminating in Japanese defeat. Less than two years later, Japan negotiated a neutrality pact with Moscow just a few months before Germany’s onslaught on the USSR. Indeed, Japan’s July 1940 declaration that it was pursuing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was motivated in part by a determination to stave off any potential German imperial intrusion into a region that Tokyo wished to secure as its own sphere of influence. In December 1941, Hitler did follow through on his promise to declare war on the United States if Japan would take the plunge into a Pacific war.

‘Wide-ranging while sharply focused, limpidly written while attuned to complexity and nuance, this confident comparative study of European and Asian societies’ reactions to Axis occupation should be read by anyone interested in 20th-century global history.’ - Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Penn State University

‘The topic of wartime occupation remains fascinating and controversial, but there has been little study to date of where the European and East Asian experiences resembled each other or differed. Aviel Roshwald breaks new ground by examining occupation in wartime Greece, Italy and France and providing parallels with China and Thailand. This is comparative history at its most stimulating and suggestive.’ - Rana Mitter, University of Oxford

‘A masterful synthesis of the Axis occupations and a true global history of World War II. Told with great clarity and interpretive verve, this book makes sense of the diversity of political responses to wartime occupation across Europe and Asia. A must-read!’ - Jeremy A. Yellen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong