Abstract
The Second World War occurred more than 75 years ago, but it still influences current societies in many ways. Arguably the most barbaric conflict in the history of humankind —with estimates of the number of people killed ranging between 60 and 100 million—the Second World War is to this day a moral benchmark. As Matthias Strohn states in the introduction to The Long Shadow of World War II. The Legacy of the War and its Impact on Political and Military Thinking since 1945, ‘It is said that traumatic psychological experiences can be passed on for generations, and World War II probably caused more traumatic experiences than any other conflict the world has ever seen, be it among the soldiers who fought, the populations in the bombed-out cities or the inmates of the concentration camps’ (p. 5). It is no coincidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps hammering the anvil of the Second World War in his ‘justification’ for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or that Western leaders keep using the failed ‘Appeasement’ of the 1930s as a starting point for how they approach international relations and threats to peace and stability.
In The Long Shadow of World War II, Strohn has collected together a number of very interesting essays on how the conflict played out in various countries, ranging from the United Kingdom to Poland to the continent of Africa. The book starts with a chapter by Pavel K. Baev on how Russia has struggled with the legacy of the Great Patriotic War. Although the book was published before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Baev makes several interesting, though sometimes debatable, observations. For example, he states that ‘the effectiveness of the well-funded policy of consolidating mass support for Putin's regime by exploiting the memories of the GPW [Great Patriotic War] is clearly diminishing. The occasion for re-energising these memories on the 75th anniversary of the victory has passed without any useful results, and further attempts to play on the legacy of common determined effort and painful sacrifices could be counterproductive’ (pp. 13-14). As yet, however, we see little signs of this.
Of course, Baev is correct when he states that the Great Patriotic War is misused in propaganda. For example, there is the story of ‘Panfilov's 28’, who fought themselves to death in November 1941 against a superior force of 18 German tanks. However, the story was totally fabricated. In 2016, the action movie ‘Panfilov's 28’ was released, prompting the director of the Russian state archive to publish on its website a 1948-report which had debunked the whole story as false. The archive's director was fired and the institution placed under direct supervision of Putin. For the Russian military, the Great Patriotic War still in many ways determines its strategy. In Baev's almost prophetic words, ‘The old fear of a surprise attack, rooted in the shock of 22 June 1941, blends with the new fear of a sudden explosion of mass protests, aggravated by the unrest in Belarus, to produce a strategic mindset that focuses on preemptive strikes, disregards human costs and casualties, and expects escalation of “hybrid warfare” to a nuclear exchange’ (p. 21).
As Strohn shows in his chapter, the legacy of World War II has had an enormous impact and influence on Germany too. One could see it, for example, in Berlin's initial hesitation to send heavy weapons, especially tanks, to Ukraine during the recent invasion. Strohn is correct when he states that Germany has lived under the shadow of the history of World War II for a long time. In some areas, the links to earlier times are weakening as time progresses and the direct memory of this dark period fades and disappears with those who lived through it. Names like Königsberg or Breslau do not mean a lot to most Germans today and, amongst the young generation, many probably do not even know that these were German cities up to 1945' (p. 58). And yet, young Germans continue to insist that more attention should be paid to the Second World War, so as to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
A country where the Second World War is definitely not fading into the background is China. As Kerry Brown makes clear, the war was a catastrophe that made the communists’ radical prognosis of society's ills, and a potential solution, viable. Brown states: ‘This narrative sponsored by the communists, one that has become dominant after they came to power, relegates military issues beneath political ones’ (p. 65). One should not forget that China lost an estimated 20 million people, suffering huge damage to its infrastructure. The Japanese occupation of parts of China was every bit as brutal and savage as that seen in Europe. In Brown's words: ‘It is these aspects of the Chinese experience of World War II which were so traumatic and enduring, and which continue to frame the Chinese vision of history and of their own historic mission and development to this day’ (p. 68).
All essays in this volume are of high quality and provide many useful and valuable insights into the legacy of the Second World War. Perhaps the chapter that stands out most is Michael S. Neiberg's consideration of the United States. As he shows, the Second World War confirmed the bias inherent in America's own self-image. Neiberg states that the ‘World War II experience has been so fundamental to American identity at the individual and national levels that it has become the nation's most available historical analogy when it faces a new crisis of almost every kind’ (p. 129). Of course, the myth of ‘the good war’ also blinded Americans to the fact that waging war does not always—on the contrary—offer a good solution to a crisis: the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan speak for themselves. Neiberg is also right to point out that the United States fought the Second World War with a segregated army, ‘showed scant concern for the fate of Europe's Jews even after evidence of genocide had become irrefutable, and interned Japanese-Americans into squalid camps on unfounded charges of treason’ (p. 130).
The chapter by Jan Hoffenaar on the Netherlands is very interesting as well, especially from the perspective of small countries in international relations. We know a lot about the ‘big players’, but far less about smaller and middle-sized countries. That also applies to Niels Bo Poulsen's chapter on Denmark. Strohn has collected essays of high quality on the legacy of the Second World War. This book is highly recommended for those interested in the Second World War in general, and especially to those who want to know more about so-called ‘memory studies’ or ‘memory wars’.